Bob Ainsworth: I heard, "Not a lot" from a sedentary position. We are approaching the figure of 40,000 additional troops that General McChrystal requested. The Americans have overwhelmingly provided them and we have made a substantial contribution, but so have other partners-it is wrong to deny that. The countries to which my hon. Friend refers are providing all the things that he mentioned, such as money-sometimes nations have the ability to make a military contribution in Afghanistan but cannot finance it, so bringing different partners together to try to help finance things that others are prepared to do is another aspect of burden sharing that we are encouraging and getting into in detail with some of our allies.

Natascha Engel: While the upgrades are more than welcome, people such as my constituent Andy Hibberd, a recent ex-serviceman, have direct experience of seriously sub-standard accommodation. What can my hon. Friend do and say to reassure my constituent that much more is being done to ensure that every single serviceman-and, more to the point, the family of every single serviceman-has a decent home in which to live?

Jeremy Corbyn: Does the Minister not agree that we would be much better employed by awaiting the outcome of the nuclear non-proliferation treaty review, and making a real contribution towards global disarmament by cancelling the replacement of Trident and spending the money on something more socially useful and less divisive, not another weapon of mass destruction?

Bob Ainsworth: The defence advisory forum has been of great assistance in the preparation of the Green Paper. Not only have we allowed and encouraged various experts to give us the benefit of their views as we have been drawing up the paper, but we have also managed to encourage the other two political parties to participate-we tried to ensure that the Green Paper has a broad political base for the propositions that it makes.

Bill Rammell: Like my right hon. Friend, I support the excellent work done by the Royal Regiment of Fusiliers in Musa Qala and Sangin valley. I know that she has been a strong advocate of the work that they have been undertaking. I also agree that the manifesto of the Royal British Legion is a substantial document that contains many significant and positive ideas, a number of which are already being implemented, and I endorse it.

Bob Ainsworth: There is a project to increase the electric supply to the whole of Afghanistan and the turbine at Kajaki is an important part of that. It is not all that we have relied on, and there have been local generation schemes, too. Of course it took a great deal of effort to get that turbine up to Kajaki; it was a tremendous achievement to get it there. Although we have not made the kind of progress that we would have wanted to make within the time scales that we would have wanted to meet in order to get the benefit of that achievement, the Kajaki dam none the less delivers electricity, and we are hopeful that we can increase the amount of electricity that it provides.

Kevan Jones: I agree with the hon. Gentleman. This issue has also been raised with me and is part of Lord Boyce's review.

Sadiq Khan: With permission, Mr. Speaker, I shall repeat a statement that my right hon. and noble Friend the Secretary of State for Transport made about the severe weather, transport networks and public services.
	With leave, I will make a statement on the recent prolonged severe weather that we are currently experiencing and on the steps being taken to support our public services. The current cold weather began in mid-December and is the most prolonged spell of freezing conditions across the UK since December 1981. The Met Office forecasts that the current very cold conditions are likely to continue across most of the country for some days longer.
	These extreme conditions continue to affect our transport and energy networks, as well as public services, including schools and hospitals. I would like to thank the many hundreds of thousands of people working tirelessly across the country to keep Britain moving in these extreme conditions.
	Over the past weeks, we have seen many tremendous examples of Britain's community spirit in action, with people lending vehicles, digging clear paths to allow ambulances and police vehicles through and visiting neighbours in need. We will do all that we can to support and encourage people helping out in their communities.
	Our key priority is to keep open the core transport networks, national and local. All main transport networks are operational, even though with reduced services in some areas. The vast majority of the motorways and major trunk roads remain open. Network Rail and the train operating companies advise that the major rail routes are open, subject to delays and cancellations. The position is similar for air travellers. Eurostar is running a reduced service. Our advice remains that people should check routes before they travel, and I thank all travellers for their forbearance at this time.
	To keep our roads open, much of our attention has been on ensuring that ploughs and gritters have got out to where they are needed most. The Highways Agency has had its fleet of 500 salt spreaders and snow ploughs out in force throughout this period, as have local authorities.
	Last week, we opened Salt Cell-a collaborative task force involving central Government, the Local Government Association, the Met Office, the devolved Administrations and Transport for London. The group advises salt suppliers on how best to distribute salt.
	Last Friday, I directed the Highways Agency to manage its use of salt in response to forecasts of prolonged bad weather, by reducing its daily use of salt by at least 25 per cent. It has achieved that by taking measures such as not directly spreading salt on the hard shoulder of motorways.
	For local roads, the Local Government Association and the Mayor of London have agreed to reduce daily use by at least 25 per cent. also, recognising the importance of mutual support to keep Britain moving safely. Local authorities are taking their own decisions on the prioritisation of supplies in their localities. The Highways Agency has played a key role in providing mutual aid of additional salt and gritters to local highway authorities and key organisations, such as Felixstowe port.
	We continue to take all possible steps to maximise the production of salt from our principal suppliers. On 29 December, the Highways Agency placed an order for significant additional salt imports, which are due to start arriving later this month.
	The energy sector is experiencing high demand due to the extreme conditions. The system has been responding generally well at a time of record demand. However, ongoing supply issues in Norway have caused National Grid to issue a gas balancing alert today, as well as on Saturday, when the problems arose. The gas balancing alert is a tool that National Grid uses to make sure that there is enough gas on tap and there is no shortage of supply for domestic customers.
	The Department for Work and Pensions is helping citizens in two ways this winter: with winter fuel payments-first introduced in 1997, and now standing at £250 for pensioner households, rising to £400 for the over-80s-and cold weather payments of £25 for those in receipt of pension credit, where there are sub-zero temperatures over the course of seven consecutive days. Cold weather payments were last year increased to £25 from £8.50 per week. These payments are automatic. Everyone in Great Britain who is entitled will get them and should not worry about turning up their heating.
	During times of increased demand, we all need to think responsibly about whether our health issues are a genuine priority and use NHS resources responsibly. Medical advice is available by phone through NHS Direct.
	There are no reports of major problems with food supplies reaching retailers. Because the UK has a diverse supply of food from domestic and international suppliers, we are not reliant on just one source of food, which helps maintain stability of supply as well as helping keep prices stable. Last week we relaxed the enforcement of drivers' hours regulations to ensure that the essential deliveries of rock salt and animal feed could be made. Over the weekend, we further relaxed the enforcement of the regulations to allow the delivery of fuel oil to remote areas of Scotland and of de-icer to airports, and to allow bulk milk tankers to continue making their deliveries.
	Schools are making every effort to reopen after last week's closures, and this week there has been a significant improvement. The Department for Children, Schools and Families reports that virtually all exam centres are able to run their exams as scheduled, or have found alternative locations at which to hold them.
	I know that the House will wish to join me in thanking the hundreds of thousands of people across the transport industries, the NHS, the education system, the armed forces, local authorities and other public services for helping all our communities come through this severe weather. However, the forecasts are for a further period of snow and sub-zero overnight temperatures and we must take further steps to keep Britain moving.
	In July last year, the UK Roads Liaison Group published a report into the lessons learned from the severe weather experienced in February 2009. Recommendations that were made to central Government were adopted immediately and in full. There were recommendations to local authorities as well, on which individual authorities were expected to act. The key recommendation was that local highway authorities should keep at least six days of salt stocks, and that over and above this the Highways Agency should hold an additional strategic supply to underpin national resilience. To this end, the Highways Agency came into this winter period with a 13-day supply of salt, subject of course to replenishment.
	The report also made recommendations for my Department to convene a Salt Cell task force to prioritise supplies in the event of extreme conditions. This we have done. Salt Cell has enabled us to prioritise salt distribution to where it is most needed, and I am grateful for the co-operation of the Local Government Association, the Mayor of London and the devolved Administrations. Salt Cell next meets tomorrow morning.
	Given the prolongation of the very cold weather, further measures are likely to be required over the next 48 hours to keep networks open. These are likely to include further steps to conserve salt, to ensure that the Highways Agency and local authorities can manage during the continuing severe weather. The Local Government Association and the Government are in constant contact and we will continue to take the necessary operational decisions to keep networks open as far as possible. We are experiencing the most severe weather conditions for 29 years, in common with much of northern Europe. We need to continue pulling together for the common good, as we have done over the past weeks.

Theresa Villiers: I thank the Minister for advance notice of his statement.
	Like the Minister, I pay tribute to all the councils, council workers, salt producers, the armed forces, the police and others who are working so hard to try and keep the country moving during the present crisis. We should remember that many communities have had three solid weeks of this, without the brief respite over Christmas that much of the south-east enjoyed.
	Everyone accepts that a degree of disruption is inevitable with such extreme weather, but the Government have important questions to answer about the adequacy of the preparations that they made for the weather episode. It is not acceptable for the Government just to pass the buck to local authorities. Will the Government accept their share of responsibility for the current shortage of gritting salt, particularly in the light of the fact that the Government's Salt Cell now controls allocations of salt across the country?
	What are the local salt stocks now held in the UK, and how long will they last? Which areas in need have the lowest stocks? Does the Minister have any estimate of the proportion of roads and pavements that have not been gritted or cleared? Have our armed services got all the salt that they need? Should the NHS be included in the Salt Cell to help ensure that hospitals and emergency services have access to all the salt that they need? Why did it take until last week to relax drivers' hours, when these problems have been ongoing for nearly a month?
	The media have reported a recent diversion of exported salt to use in this country. What other exports have taken place since the cold weather episode began, and why were steps not taken more quickly to divert exports back for UK use? Why is Salt Cell not meeting today, given the urgency of the situation? What estimate has the Minister made of the cost of repairing the damage to the roads caused by the freezing conditions? Does he agree that it is wholly contrary to common sense if people feel at risk of negligence claims when they clear paths and pavements? Is that not penalising the sort of socially responsible behaviour that all parties should encourage? Is he aware that anxiety about liability was one reason why many schools stayed shut?
	The Government accused us of scaremongering about gas supplies, but if everything is fine with energy supplies why did National Grid issue its fourth alert in two weeks today? The Local Government Association, in its July report, "Weathering the Storm: Dealing with Adverse Winter Weather Conditions in the UK", concluded with the key lesson that should have been learned from last February's weather crisis and low salt supplies. It stated:
	"Effectively, the country is almost completely reliant on two main suppliers operating deliveries on a 'just in time' basis."
	Will the Minister acknowledge that the Government's failure to heed that warning meant that many councils found it almost impossible to obtain resupplies as the cold snap progressed? Will he accept that the scarcity of salt supplies has undermined councils' ability to grit and clear side roads and pavements? Will he acknowledge the extent of the concern about slippery pavements-shown particularly by the elderly, many of whom have felt reluctant to leave their homes for the past few weeks?
	The Secretary of State's requests for councils to reduce their daily use of salt by 25 per cent. was an admission of failure by the Government. They made inadequate preparations for the cold weather; they sat on the LGA's report on the issue until two days before the snow started to fall; and they failed to learn the lessons of February 2009, leaving our road network far more vulnerable to disruption than it should have been-to the detriment of families and businesses throughout the country, already struggling with the impact of one of the longest and deepest recessions in modern history.

Norman Baker: May I, too, pass on my thanks to the staff of the Highways Agency and local councils, and indeed the railway industry, for what they have been doing to try to keep our infrastructure going?
	I accept that, as the Minister says, much of what takes place is a matter for devolved local council work, or for private companies such as the salt companies, but I hope that he accepts that the Government have an ultimate responsibility to ensure that the national infrastructure is kept operational and intact. With that in mind, will he reflect on the suggestion that local authorities should have had six days' supply of salt and consider whether that is adequate given the experience that we have had, and given that, as regards the order that was put in on 29 December, it will take some time for overseas stocks to arrive, which means that if the weather deteriorates-it may not-we could run out of salt?
	Some local authorities have done extremely well, but some appear to be using the lack of salt as an excuse to cut back on gritting, perhaps unnecessarily. Will the Minister consider whether that is appropriate and examine these procedures to ensure that people across the country have the best transport infrastructure that they possibly can in the circumstances that apply?
	Will the Minister confirm that the Highways Agency has been asking local authorities whether they can help with its supplies? For example, Stockport borough council has been asked if it can help the agency by providing extra stocks.
	Does the Minister recognise that significant long-term costs will arise for local highways authorities as a result of the damage to the road network that will undoubtedly be caused by the use of salt and grit? There will be a big repair bill at the end of this-will he factor that into the local government settlement for councils?
	Notwithstanding the wish that the Minister and I share for devolution to local councils, does he recognise that some councils, including my own, have taken the view that it is inappropriate to treat any pavements at all and have concentrated all their salting and gritting on the roads? Is not that unfair on pedestrians, particularly those who are elderly and infirm, and may, for example, have to get off a bus on to an ice sheet next to the bus stop?
	Will the Minister examine the cost to the economy of this episode, which is running into billions? Will he consider whether higher levels of grit and salt maintained by local councils would do more to minimise the damage to the economy, as well as the cost to the NHS arising from people being in hospital unnecessarily as a consequence of falls?
	On legality, does the Minister accept that, unfortunately, some people, including those in schools, are genuinely concerned about possible liability issues? In my view, many schools should have opened much sooner but have not done so because of fears of liability. What sense does it make for children to be turning up at school, having trudged their way through ice and snow to get there, only to be told that they have to stay indoors and cannot go out in the playground to play because schools are worried about being sued if the children fall over there?
	Finally, will the Minister ensure that there is a review of this whole episode and report back to Parliament in due course on the lessons to be learned?

Sadiq Khan: I thank the hon. Gentleman for his comments and questions. He is right to refer to the issue of six days' supply of salt. I draw his attention to the UKRLG report, which is a very full report that touches on many of the issues raised. In chapter 8, under the heading "Winter Service Resilience", it recommended six days' worth of salt as an adequate amount. In the group's mind must have been the fact that, in February 2009, we had the worst weather in 18 years. We now have the worst weather in 29 years, and I suspect that once we reach the end of this prolonged period of bad weather and consider our options for reviews and so on, we will need to make a cost-benefit analysis of whether, given that we have had prolonged bad weather in two consecutive years, it makes more sense to save enough salt for a longer period. That analysis would include, for example, investment in salt barns, because one of the big challenges for local authorities and the Highways Agency is the amount of storage space that they have for salt. Local authorities have asked themselves whether it is worth their spending money on salt barns given that they use salt so infrequently. That is for experts to consider, not for me on the Floor of the House, but it is an important question.
	The hon. Gentleman raised an important point about diversifying suppliers in the chain. Salt is a geological issue and I cannot invent salt in the mines of England overnight, but as part of the contractual terms with suppliers, even domestic suppliers can be asked to have some foreign imports in their supply chain. The Highways Agency does that to ensure that it protects our supply chain of salt.
	The hon. Gentleman made an important point about mutual aid. We can provide central aid to local authorities, but there are also many really good examples of local authorities helping others that have less salt, for obvious reasons, by giving them salt. That is an example of the generosity of spirit that I mentioned, and we need more of it.
	The hon. Gentleman referred also to the damage to local authority highways caused by grit and salt, which is one issue that will need to be considered in a cost-benefit analysis of the general pattern of bad weather. He will be aware from the urgent question last week and my response to it that I cannot give advice centrally about which pavements should be gritted and which should not, and Salt Cell, the Government and extreme bad weather cannot be used as an excuse for a local authority not discharging its responsibility as it should. A local authority needs to consider the fact that as a matter of common sense, a pathway that leads to a general practitioner's practice, for example, is probably more in need of gritting than a road that very few people drive down. Once again, it is for local authorities to take that decision.
	The hon. Gentleman's final point was the very important one of liability, which was also raised by the hon. Member for Chipping Barnet (Mrs. Villiers). There are concerns about people being risk-averse or using the weather as an excuse not to do things that they should. I was pleased to see the comments of the president of the Association of British Insurers in the press today and yesterday, which will have given some comfort to schools and local authorities concerned about being defendants in a future civil litigation or prosecution if they open up the schools. As far as individual schools are concerned, most decisions whether to open or close are taken by head teachers. Some local authorities are giving out advice and being prescriptive, but other decisions are being taken by head teachers on a horses-for-courses basis. As I am sure the hon. Gentleman is, I am pleased that so many examination centres are open today, so that the many students who have revised for long periods can take their exams.

Martin Salter: True grit, Mr. Speaker. I think the heckling needs to be short as well.
	Does the Minister agree that one of the most important priorities must be to reopen the schools, to avoid damaging children's education but also to allow other vital public sector workers such as ambulance drivers-and dare I say?-gritter lorry drivers, NHS staff, firefighters and Highways Agency staff to get to work themselves? Will he commend the approach of Mr. Charlie Clare, head teacher of Geoffrey Field junior school in my constituency, who got together the staff, some private contractors and some parents to clear the snow and ice themselves this weekend, so that his school could open today? Teachers cannot be immune from the challenges faced in cold weather. Other public sector workers have to deal with them.

Sadiq Khan: As ever, I cannot disagree with anything that my hon. Friend has said, and I commend and endorse his points. It is worth bearing in mind that every day a school is closed, not only is children's education disrupted but the knock-on effect means that the impact on their carers is phenomenal.

Stephen O'Brien: I ask you, Mr. Speaker, and the whole House to join me in congratulating the work force at Winsford rock salt mine on their continuous, 24/7 working, be they down the mine, in the office, the order takers or the management.
	I hope that the Minister will take it as a positive and constructive comment that he should look carefully now at avoiding delays in the operation of Salt Cell so that the producers quickly get news of what is required where so that they can then get on with supplying without further delay. We should also ensure that we learn the lessons of how to resupply in the autumn rather than waiting for the winter.

Richard Caborn: May I also put on record my congratulations on the sterling work of Sheffield city council, which has done a fantastic job? That is in contrast with the Liberal leader of the council, who went on BBC radio on the evening of Friday 8 January to say that we would have a weekend of despair in the city because we had no salt and there was no telephone number to ring because people were not working over the weekend. While he was appearing on the news, 280 tonnes of salt were being delivered to Sheffield city council, and another 300 tonnes have subsequently been delivered. Will my right hon. Friend contact the city council to ensure that it has the right information so that the council leader cannot scaremonger in Sheffield?

Sadiq Khan: I undertake to get back in touch with the hon. Gentleman about the example that he raises. One of the key things that we need to do is ensure that the roads for which either the Highways Agency or the highways authorities, of which there are more than 150, are statutorily responsible are covered.

Sadiq Khan: I cannot disagree with anything the hon. Gentleman has said. I shall merely add that one reason why the UKRLG was asked to produce its review following the February experience-the worst weather for 18 years-was so that we could learn the lessons from it. We are now experiencing the worst weather for 29 years. We have a habit in this country of criticising ourselves and what we do when times are bad. However, when we compare what is happening here with the experience in northern Europe, where the weather is equally bad, we find that we have coped a lot better than France, Germany and elsewhere. The examples that the hon. Gentleman gave demonstrate the generosity of spirit and common sense of the people in Sussex and in other parts of the country.

Rosie Cooper: My constituents want to know who audits the lack of performance by local authorities, many of which have a considerable number of executives who earn more than the Prime Minister. That obviously does not include the Health and Safety Executive, because I reported Lancashire county council to the HSE last year for its blanket non-gritting of side roads and pavements. This year, the Conservative leader of Lancashire county council has berated me for wanting all the bus routes gritted. In fact, he proudly told local radio listeners that he would not do that. My question to the Minister is: is this what we have got to look forward to?

Graham Allen: May I urge my right hon. Friend to avoid another trap? Will he ensure that discussion of the teaching of social and emotional behaviour, which is fundamental to all learning at primary and secondary level, is not narrowed to one tiny sliver of the argument about personal health and social education, and that the Government's life skills package, which is widely supported throughout the House, is seen in perspective? It seems that one or two of our more exuberant colleagues want to discuss only one tiny aspect of that broad package.

Edward Balls: I agree with my hon. Friend, and wish him a very happy birthday. The fact that the hon. Member for Shipley (Philip Davies) almost certainly calls such classes "happy classes", and opposes them, contrasts starkly with what I believe to be the general view-that this is a very important part of our school system. Through sex and relationships education, through financial education and, more widely, through SEAL-social and emotional aspects of learning-we are teaching our children in primary and secondary schools resilience, character, respect and the ability to make their way in the world with pride and confidence. I think that schools that provide such teaching consider it to be an important part of the curriculum, and it must not be narrowed in the way described by my hon. Friend.

Daniel Kawczynski: The biggest problem is the huge difference in funding across the United Kingdom. The average Shropshire child receives about £3,300 per annum for his or her education, whereas in other parts of the country the figure can be as high as £9,000, £10,0000 or £11,000. What is there in the Bill to redress that huge difference in funding levels?

Edward Balls: No; if I may be allowed to do so, I shall finish my points before the hon. Gentleman stands up again.
	I am raising the schools budget in 2011-12 and 2012-13, with the agreement of the Chancellor. The hon. Gentleman proposes to cut the schools budget in 2010-11, however; the reason for that is that the shadow Chancellor has told him he has got to do so. Despite regular attempts in the House to wriggle out of this, the fact is that, unlike the Conservatives' health budget, under the hon. Gentleman's watch the education budget is set to be cut.

Graham Allen: On a point of order, Mr. Deputy Speaker. Many Back Benchers wish to speak in this debate. Given that Front Benchers will get a lot of time to make their points-even if they wish to make the same point five times-is it possible to take time off Front-Benchers' speeches if they constantly interrupt at the expense of Back-Bench time?

Edward Balls: I can give my hon. Friend that assurance. As she knows, the schools census collects data on children with statements and on school action plus and they show that as of January 2009 there were 51,200 pupils on the autistic spectrum. In addition, the Special Educational Needs (Information) Act 2008, which came into effect in January, is giving us more information about the characteristics of those pupils, their attainment and the progress that they make. We first published those statistics in October, they include children on the autistic spectrum and we will continue to ensure that we prioritise those children, as we showed in the Lamb review. I should say to my hon. Friend that the leadership that she has shown on these matters has been hugely important in raising opportunity and standards for children in our country who have a special education need.
	The fact is that 100,000 more children are now leaving primary school secure in English and 100,000 more are secure in maths compared with 1997. However, a world-class education system demands that no child's progress is allowed to stall or be held back. We know that many children, at certain points of their school life, benefit from short bursts of tailored, individual support alongside effective class teaching. Personal tuition must not just be the preserve of those who can afford it, so our pupil guarantee will entitle any child who falls behind in reading or writing or maths during primary school-in key stage 1 or in key stage 2-and any young person who starts secondary school behind expectations to catch-up support, with all looked-after children also automatically receiving one-to-one tuition so that they develop the basic skills they need. These guarantees of one-to-one catch-up support can be delivered only by the rising real-terms budgets for the schools system set out in the pre-Budget report.

Robert Goodwill: The Secretary of State is aware of the battle that many parents have to go through to get their children statemented-a battle that middle-class articulate parents often succeed in. Does he agree that one of the biggest problems is that when people move around the country they have to commence that battle again? That is particularly a problem for those in armed services who will be moved from Catterick to Cheltenham to Colchester to wherever else, which means that they are perpetually engaged in this fight.

Barry Sheerman: I am grateful for all the publicity of the Select Committee's report. Does my right hon. Friend agree that one problem that the Select Committee found when we discussed this in great depth-it will be discussed seriously again in Committee-is that the Government propose to have a compulsory register with no penalties? We thought, "Why not try it for two years on a voluntary basis? If that does not work, we move to a system even with penalties."

Edward Balls: Because some academies are innovating in the way that they organise the school term and the school day, and how they provide their provision. All the information that I have shows that academies are more than delivering on the national agreement on terms and conditions of staff. I have said regularly that if there were clear evidence that they were not doing so, I would be willing to look at it, but so far none has been provided to me. Those flexibilities on the curriculum and on terms and conditions have been an important part of the success of the academies movement, and there is widespread support for them.

Edward Balls: I said a moment ago that we would legislate for a licence to practise that would give teachers the same professional standing that there is for doctors and lawyers. We are discussing with teachers and head teachers the details of how that will operate, and the Bill provides a framework power to introduce it. It is essential to ensure not only that we match professional development and support for teachers with a light-touch way of operating it for the vast majority, but that we are clear that where there is underperformance there is an obligation on the school to ensure that bad teaching is addressed. We are starting to introduce the licence to practise in September with newly qualified teachers and returning teachers who have been out of the profession for some time. Our aim, over time, is for it to apply to all qualified teachers. Some people have expressed concerns-on one side of the argument, that it will be too heavy-handed and therefore make life difficult for teachers, and on the other that it will be too light touch and will not ensure that there is sufficient action in the small minority of cases where teaching is substandard. We need to get the balance right. We will have to discuss that in detail, and the views of the Children, Schools and Families Committee would be very welcome.
	There is an alternative vision, some of which we heard about earlier in the regular interventions by the shadow schools spokesman, and which stretches across several different areas of the Bill. On catch-up support, there is a refusal to match our guarantees to primary school and year 7 pupils. On qualifications and the curriculum, there is a commitment to scrapping the national curriculum. On teachers and head teachers, there is a promise to end key stage 2 tests and to break promises on pay and conditions. On school improvements, there is a policy of removing the role of local authorities and expecting parents to have the time and know-how to set up their own schools or to get private sector firms to come in to run schools and make profits while other schools are allowed to wither or decline, and watching as some young people are relegated to a second-class education.
	There is also-we have not heard it yet, but I am sure that we will in the speech by the hon. Member for Surrey Heath-a continuing scepticism about whether the rise in standards that we have seen over the past 10 years is real or is due to the dumbing down of our exams. I say regularly in this House that the introduction of Ofqual, our independent standards regulator, is a very important protection against dumbing down and easier exams, but time after time those claims are refuted-although, as we saw in the Queen's Speech debate on the subject, when I asked the hon. Gentleman a few exam questions on maths and science, he turned out not to know the answers. That is partly because the questions were quite hard. The question is, though, has he done any revision? Should we allow him to do a retake? Very briefly, I have two quick exam questions for him. First, two whole numbers are each between 50 and 70. They multiply-

Edward Balls: My hon. Friend is completely right. That is the difference. Do we have a market-based mechanism, with some schools withering on the vine while others expand, or do we drive school improvement by the measures in the Bill? It contains clear guarantees to parents and pupils, a decent licence to practise so that professional standards are maintained, and more power and independence for head teachers to drive up standards in their schools, backed by the active support of parents in home-school agreements. That is what we have set out in the Bill.
	It will not be possible to deliver the guarantees and reforms in the Bill unless the money is available to pay for them. I made it clear in response to interventions at the beginning of my speech that with me, school spending would rise this year, next year and the year after, but that with the Opposition, it would be cut next year, the after and the year after that. As the shadow Chancellor has made clear, their priority is not school spending or one-to-one catch-up support but an inheritance tax cut for 3,000 of the richest millionaires. That is the choice. Our vision in the Bill is a world-class education system with excellence and opportunity for all, not just some. That is the choice, and that is what the Bill guarantees, and I commend the Bill to the House.

Michael Gove: May I first associate myself with the comments of the Secretary of State about the former Member for North-West Leicestershire? We all miss him from his accustomed place on the back row of the Government green Benches. He was a good, kind and generous man, a fantastic constituency Member of Parliament, a grammar school boy, who never lost the love of learning-I benefited personally from his wise advice throughout my time in the House. He will be sorely missed and I should like, on behalf of Conservative Members, to associate myself with every word that the Secretary of State said. We would like to send our best wishes to his widow and his four lovely daughters.
	May I also associate myself with the Secretary of State's comments about the success of so many providers of information technology in showcasing their wares in our schools and, more broadly, in education in England, Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales? I am delighted that so many Ministers and individuals from abroad have come to admire what is happening, not only in ICT but more broadly in educational innovation.
	I am sorry that we did not have an opportunity to see the Secretary of State play Magnus Magnusson again and demonstrate what a mastermind he is. What a pity that other members of the Cabinet are not here to play the quiz that they most enjoy with the Secretary of State and have the opportunity to say, "You are the weakest link."
	After the events of last week, may I say what a pleasure it is for all Conservative Members to see the Secretary of State still in his place? We are all delighted that he has enjoyed a high profile in recent days and look forward to his playing an even more prominent role in the campaign ahead-or should that be "campaigns"? As well as wanting him to play as a big a role as possible in the general election campaign, I greatly hope that he will play as big a role as possible in any leadership campaigns that follow it. We assure him of our enthusiastic support.
	I suspect that the Bill, whether it is passed or not, will end up being the Secretary of State's monument. Balfour's monument was the Education Act 1902, which established a universal system of local education provision. Rab Butler's monument was the Education Act 1944, which established universal free secondary provision. Lord Baker of Dorking's monument was the Education Reform Act 1988, which gave effect to the principles of parental choice, transparent assessment, diversity in the state system and greater freedom for individual schools. As the Secretary of State's monument, the Bill seeks to establish in law one of his highest priorities-a goal that he pursues with restless zeal; indeed, it is his motivation for being in public office: drawing dividing lines.
	Even before he was in the Cabinet, when he was a Back Bencher, doubtless leading the fight against any attempt on the Back Benches to organise against the incumbent leader, he told the  New Statesman that he wanted to "get back" to dividing lines on education with the Conservatives. That was his highest priority-not helping the poorest, raising standard or supporting professionals, but drawing a dividing line. I do not feel personally affronted by that. The Secretary of State cannot meet anyone outside his immediate family without wanting to draw dividing lines between them. Perhaps he is right and the rest of us-all of us-are wrong. Perhaps he is the Galileo of education policy-uniquely and brilliantly insightful while all around him is mediaeval darkness and error. However, on the Bill, I am happy to be on the other side of the argument. The debate at the heart of the measure is, as the right hon. Gentleman says, about how one drives up standards in schools.

Ken Purchase: I really wanted to talk about academies, but if we ask that question, we find a great body of education theory and practice that shows that, at an older age, children respond better one-to-one and that, at a younger age, they often respond better in small groups. That is the theory behind what the Secretary of State is saying.

Michael Gove: I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for pointing out how loosely framed this guarantee is. Perhaps it was supposed to be iron-cast or cast iron, but it does not seem to be particularly robust.
	There is also a guarantee in the White Paper on out-of-school activities. Schools are supposed to guarantee a list of activities, which
	"may include study support, play/recreation, sport, music clubs, arts and crafts and other special interest clubs, and business and enterprise activities".
	Which of those activities in that list have to be offered for the guarantee to be delivered-all or just a proportion of them? What proportion? Is the list exclusive? Are there other after-school activities that, if offered, would count towards the guarantee? Would the scouts count or the boys brigade? I mention them because they are not special-interest but generalist clubs.
	The reason I ask about prescription in such detail is that the Secretary of State decided to prescribe in such detail. These are not just vague aspirations that it would good to have; they are not just expectations that he is laying down as a political hope that he will fund; they are not even matters inspectable by Oftsted, which might lead a school into special measures if they are not provided. They are legal guarantees-far stronger than any of the other obligations placed on schools. If a school breaks this guarantee, it will presumably be breaking the law.
	We need precision, which is wholly absent from anything the Secretary of State has provided, in order to ensure that head teachers and people who work in schools and local authorities do not live in fear of litigation. If schools do not provide all these services, they can be taken to the local government ombudsman and if things are not resolved satisfactorily, they could end up in court. Is it really the best use of a head teacher's time to seek to ensure that every single one of these guarantees is met in the prescribed way that the Secretary of State lists, absolutely to the letter-or potentially end up in court? That cannot be right.
	In many ways, I could not admire some of these guarantees more-the aspiration to ensure that every child who can studies triple science, for example-but should heads be in the dock if the school they run cannot supply the necessary tuition because the funds have not been supplied either by the local authority or the Secretary of State? Should they be held responsible for that failure? Schools already face a formidable bureaucratic burden under the current system of Ofsted inspection-a system that we would make more light touch. Failure can be fatal to the careers of heads, but now we risk piling on another level of responsibility backed up by legal sanctions. I do not believe that that is fair. I am all in favour of sharper challenge, greater transparency and better accountability, but I am not in favour of putting the fear of even more litigation into the hearts of our teachers.

Michael Gove: I look forward to hearing the right hon. Gentleman spell out the source of the funding of those guarantees in more detail than he has hitherto. We still do not know how much he has secured as a result of the polite and temperate negotiations in which he indulged in during the prelude to the pre-Budget report. We do not know the exact global sum for the schools budget, and we do not know what precise part of it will increase. I should be delighted if he would be kind enough to let me know those figures. Perhaps we could have a private meeting to discuss the issue.

Michael Gove: Thank you, Mr. Deputy Speaker. Let me therefore repeat that my right hon. Friend the Member for Witney (Mr. Cameron) is trusted by many more parents to improve education than the Prime Minister is.
	As I understand it, the survey the Secretary of State proposes is for the parents of children in year 5 to be asked whether they are happy with the provision of secondary schools in their area. If a certain number of parents-the required number is as yet unspecified, as the hon. Member for Bury, North (Mr. Chaytor) pointed out-say they are unhappy, the local authority has to produce a response, although no time scale is specified. If the local authority produces such a report addressing the complaints of dissatisfied parents and then a number of parents-again the required number is unspecified-object, the local authority has to put its report to a schools adjudicator. If the schools adjudicator finds against the local authority, the local authority has to come back with a new report-although, again, the time scale is not specified-and so the process continues. The local authority must ultimately implement plans, unless it considers them to be unreasonable, in which case I suspect the courts will once again be called in to define exactly what is reasonable.
	Let us imagine that a local authority goes through this process and that that all happens within a year, and it then seeks to implement its plans only to find that the next cohort of parents of children in year 5 takes a completely different view of education provision. What happens then? Do we go through the same process all over again? Which group of parents is sovereign? Again, all the Secretary of State is proposing is a hugely bureaucratic process whose only certain beneficiary is the legal profession.
	Earlier, in response to remarks made by the right hon. Member for North-West Durham (Hilary Armstrong), I mentioned my concerns about the licence to teach. There is a basic question that we all, particularly the Secretary of State, must answer: what value does this add? Bureaucratic bodies very rarely resist the accretion of extra powers to themselves, but the body charged with administering this new obligation-the General Teaching Council-has signalled profound concern about the additional powers it has been asked to accept. It says that it would be a challenge to develop a system that has sufficient rigour to make a positive impact while remaining proportionate and not unduly burdensome. It also points out that many teachers are sceptical about the practical benefits that can be secured, and interpret the initiative as another burden on them and their schools. The GTC specifically worries that any message about trusting professionals would be difficult to communicate when they see this as simply something additional layered on to the many existing mechanisms to which they are subject.
	It is vital that we enhance the prestige of teaching and the esteem in which it is held, but I am not sure how that can be done simply through a process of bureaucratic certification. The answer is to raise the bar for entry to the profession and to improve continuous professional development, but the Bill contains no measures to achieve either of those aims, as both the professional associations I mentioned earlier-the National Union of Teachers and the ASCL-have pointed out.

Michael Gove: I entirely understand the point made by my hon. Friend; he is right to say that a host of reasons are involved, and it is not for us to second-guess the decisions made by parents. Many of those who sacrifice not only earnings but time make a commitment of love towards their children in order to home educate them, and that should be celebrated and applauded, not denigrated and undermined.
	One of my specific concerns is that this legislation means the state will take it upon itself to regulate what may or may not be taught in the home. Proposed new section 19C in schedule 1 provides that parents will have to produce a report in accordance with regulations laid down by the Secretary of State explaining what they propose to include in the education programme for their child. They will then have to allow an inspector in at an appropriate point, and that inspector will have to be satisfied that the education being provided is suitable, according to the regulations laid down by the Secretary of State. If that education is not considered suitable by that local authority employee, the right of that individual to be home educated can be revoked. So this is not about safeguarding or even about child protection; this is about the Secretary of State being able to say that an individual home educating parent is not providing an education that he deems appropriate and therefore they should not have the right to educate that child at home.
	One of the other terrible things about this legislation is that proposed new section 19F in schedule 1 sets out that when the information provided by a parent to a local authority changes and is found to be wrong, even if it was materially right when it was given-in other words, the parent made efforts to ensure that the information was correct but the local authority finds that it has changed in some respect-the right to educate that child at home can be revoked. Even though the parent is not at fault and sought to provide the right information at the right time in the right way, they can lose the right to educate their own child. A draconian extension of state power is potentially made possible by this Bill, which is why all my hon. Friends will be working hard in Committee to ensure that we can find a consensus on this sensitive area, so that the rights of home educating parents are respected and we do not fundamentally erode their liberties.

Michael Gove: My hon. Friend makes a very good point. More broadly, I should point out that the Secretary of State's own children's plan makes it clear that it is families that bring up children, not the state. The rights of families should be respected, and I am not convinced that they are being respected by the proposals being introduced.
	There are parts of the Bill to which the Conservatives have no objections. Such areas include the powers to intervene when youth offending teams fail and the ability of school governing bodies to establish academies-indeed, I thought that the Secretary of State made a superb case when outlining the importance of academies becoming exempt charities. I also think it is right that schools should be able to use delegated funds to provide community facilities, and the proposals to improve information sharing for local children's safeguarding boards seem sensible. We also share the Government's aspirations to ensure that children have all the skills and knowledge that the best personal, social and health education is supposed to impart, but we want to see more about precisely what is proposed, but we differ from the Government in one respect-we believe that the right of parents to withdraw their children should not be eroded. We agree with Sir Alasdair Macdonald in that respect.  [Interruption.] Exactly, we agree with his recommendation in that respect.
	There are other areas, such as the primary curriculum, about which we have profound concerns about the direction the Government are taking, and we have advertised those elsewhere. At its heart, our objection to this legislation lies in our basic view that we should regulate less, trust professionals more and build on the excellence and diversity already on display in the schools system. Our philosophy for schools is simple:
	"It is about schools feeling ownership of their own future, the power and the responsibility that comes from being free to chart their own course, experiment, innovate, doing things differently: the decision-makers in their own destiny not the recipients of a pre-destined formula laid down by Government."
	That was the case made by Tony Blair to the Specialist Schools and Academies Trust in 2006. It is a principled vision that I entirely endorse, and I am sorry only that the Secretary of State's Bill departs from it so profoundly.

Mr. Deputy Speaker: Order. The pre-debate calculations carried out did not take account of the length of the two Front-Bench speeches that we have heard, so there is pressure on the availability of time for Back-Bench speeches. Originally, a 15-minute limit was imposed and I intend to follow that for the first speech to be made from the Labour Back Benches and by the first Conservative Back Bencher. I am sorry to say that thereafter the limit will have to revert to 10 minutes if this debate is to be as inclusive as most people would wish it to be. I hope that that will be seen as a reasonable decision in the circumstances. I call Hilary Armstrong.

Hilary Armstrong: I trust that I shall take a fair deal less than the 15 minutes allocated to me, Mr. Deputy Speaker. I found the exchanges between the two Front Benchers fascinating, and I am sorry that I shall not follow them in talking mainly about schools.
	I wish to discuss some of the Bill's specific aspects, much of which I welcome, for example, the statutory basis on which the Government propose to put personal, social and health education. Most of my remarks result from my experience, gained both before I came to this House and in this House, of the effects of social exclusion, in particular.
	I cannot stress too strongly how we must help and support those children who do not get the support from their families that the hon. Member for Surrey Heath (Michael Gove) was talking about, or how we must work with them so that they can take advantage of the opportunities that are available to them. The evidence from many different reports that I saw when I was in the Cabinet Office is that emotional well-being is critical to enabling the most vulnerable to learn, and so paying attention to that is very important. There are some superb programmes out there and we should be far more centrally prescriptive when it comes to what we know works in PSHE. My hon. Friend the Member for Nottingham, North (Mr. Allen) knows the programmes about which I am talking.
	For very young children, but also as the children get older, learning to deal effectively with relationship development and, yes, with sex education is critical. The schools and local authorities that do that effectively are precisely the schools and local authorities that are successfully reducing teenage pregnancy rates. We are daft in this place if we simply say, "Oh, we don't like that. We're frightened of that." We must consider such an approach and we must use the programmes that we know work. We should use the experience that there is out there and spread the good practice much more effectively around the country.

Graham Allen: First, may I commend my right hon. Friend for her fantastic work on this issue when she was in the Cabinet Office? Does she accept that in order to spread the good practice around and to ensure that the best policies are more broadly spread, we need something like a national policy assessment centre? Rather than constantly re-inventing the wheel and trying to pick up pet projects, we should put forward a series of proven policies which have an evidence base. We can then help local authorities and others to achieve the right early interventions.

Hilary Armstrong: I support that, as my hon. Friend knows, and I have suggested those ideas to the Department over a number of years. An embryo organisation exists for that task, but I do not think that it yet has the power or authority effectively to implement such a process throughout local government. I would like to see that happen.
	My second point concerns partnerships with schools. I want to see more examples of the voluntary sector and the outside world working in partnership with schools. If PSHE is being considered as part of the curriculum, the teacher needs to be part of that but including the work of outside bodies, and making relationships with them, is also critical. I want schools and academies to use their commissioning powers to work more effectively with community organisations that have a good track record so that they can be used to improve the educational opportunities of the children in the school.
	I am sorry, Mr. Deputy Speaker, that I am moving from issue to issue without much of a common thread, but I want to pick out particular issues in the Bill. The implementation of the youth crime action plan, a matter on which the Front Benchers did not disagree, is very important. Last week, the Department produced an evaluation of the work so far and it raised some important questions and identified problems with what has been done so far. When anything is implemented in a local area it is critical that the local community should know what is going on-I hope that the Committee will bear that in mind.
	I have seen the youth court operating in Washington, and it is incredibly effective. I have also seen the community court operating in Red Hook in Washington. The key thing is that although they set down non-custodial activity, the community knows and understands the action that is being taken and therefore has confidence in it. We do not get all the stories along the lines of, "This one was out painting a wall when they should have been inside," and so on. The approach of those courts has been far more effective in tackling youth crime than many of the things that we have done elsewhere.
	I spent much of my life before I came to this place working with young people and trying to divert them from criminal behaviour, but it is critical that if they have engaged in such behaviour we should try not only to divert them from it in the future but to ensure that there is a structure of punishment. There must be a structure whereby they know that they have done wrong and work out with somebody what to do about it. I cannot understand people who see these two things as being on opposite benches, as it were. They are part and parcel of the same policy and we have to ensure that that is how we proceed in the future. Far too often, the youth offending teams have mixed that up, which has been a problem in local areas.
	More than anything else, many of these young people need some structure in their lives. They are growing up in families where they have no sense of right and wrong and no sense of what is acceptable and what is not. An important part of being an adolescent is testing boundaries, but that means that there need to be boundaries that can be tested and that the adolescent needs to understand that there are such boundaries. The way in which we develop the youth offending programme is becoming more and more important in this country because in many communities such offending drains the life and ambition out of the community, meaning that people feel that there is no point in getting together to do anything because of the level of antisocial behaviour and so on. There are things that we can do that will encourage young people but also help them to set those boundaries much more effectively. We have to include the local community in that, although we have been fearful of such an approach in this country, for reasons that I understand. If we are to change the experience of young people, we need to involve the community in a much more effective way.
	That brings me to the final point that I want to tackle today, which is another issue about which there was no division between the two Front-Bench spokesmen, although there is a lot of anxiety about how it will be implemented, and it concerns the family proceedings. Everyone accepts that there should be more transparency and openness, but the Bill also affects the level of reporting. In being more open and transparent, we must maintain caution about what is reported and how it is reported. I have worked with far too many families and have been present at far too many cases in which there have been problems despite the Children Act 1989, which put the primacy of children at the forefront. I did not want to intervene on this point earlier, but that primacy remains through all legislation unless it is changed, so it does not need to be restated in this Bill. The primacy of the interests of children is critical but because of the irresponsible way in which some of our newspapers are prepared to report family proceedings, we must continue to exercise caution.
	This House has established proceedings whereby Public Bill Committees can talk to outside bodies before they consider legislation in detail. I hope that the Committee will consider doing so, particularly as regards family proceedings. Although, in principle, many organisations want such proceedings to be opened up and reported, they are very anxious about the detail. We should respect that.

David Laws: I beg to move an amendment, to leave out from "That" to the end of the Question and add:
	"this House declines to give a Second Reading to the Children, Schools and Families Bill because it adds hugely to the bureaucratic burdens on schools and colleges without improving real opportunities and educational standards for pupils and without genuinely empowering parents; its proposals for the regulation of home education introduce powers which are excessive and risk undermining key freedoms for home educators; it fails to put in place a coherent system for delivering school improvement; its provisions on family proceedings have not been properly consulted on and do not take account of existing reforms; and it does not include much needed policies to introduce a Pupil Premium to support the education of children from disadvantaged homes or to establish a new Educational Standards Authority to restore confidence in educational standards and to reduce the extent of destabilising political interference in English education."
	It is a pleasure to follow the right hon. Member for North-West Durham (Hilary Armstrong), and I agree strongly with several of her points about the release of sensitive information in the family court. I hope that we will have the opportunity to consider that issue in some detail in Committee. I appreciate that we are short of time today, and I shall do my best to limit my comments on the Bill, which covers many extremely important areas.
	I should like to put on record the sadness of my party at the death of the former hon. Member for North-West Leicestershire, Mr. David Taylor. He was much respected across the House and he will be fondly remembered not only by Labour Members, but by Opposition Members, and our thoughts are with his family at this time.
	Before I come to my substantive comments about the Bill, I have a request for Ministers. Will one of them, when they respond to the debate, clarify a point that got slightly mangled in the exchange between the Secretary of State and the hon. Member for Keighley (Mrs. Cryer) regarding her question about reasonable punishment? She asked about individuals who attend madrassahs and other such quasi-educational settings and whether they should be covered by the existing restrictions on corporal punishment. I thought that the Secretary of State indicated that he was sympathetic to the hon. Lady's point, but that approach appears to contradict both the existing legal position and a letter that Baroness Morgan, a Minister in his Department, sent to a lobby group that is pressuring for a change in the law on this issue. The letter of 6 January to the Children Are Unbeatable! Alliance said that some such educational and quasi-educational settings are currently exempt from the existing restrictions on physical punishment. Unless I got the wrong end of the stick, the Secretary of State showed sympathy for the hon. Lady's point, but his Department's position appears to be that the existing legislation will not be changed.
	It is obvious from the Liberal Democrat's amendment that we have considerable concerns about the Bill, and that we hope that the House will do the country a service either by not allowing it through the House before the general election, or by making massive changes to the Bill. It is extraordinary that, on the day on which the Secretary of State has effectively had to boast in the  Financial Times that we are going to have the poorest education funding settlement since 1997, the Bill proposes to spend about £1.1 billion, in net present value terms, on additional bureaucracy. That money will not be available to front-line education to go to schools and parents and to assist pupils. This point relates to the additional money that will be spent on the bureaucracy surrounding home-school agreements and the bureaucracy concerning pupil and parent guarantees, which even the Government have been unable to cost in the cost-benefit analysis that comes with the Bill. It is also relates to the parental surveys that the hon. Member for Surrey Heath (Michael Gove) mentioned earlier, and to the cost of school improvement partners and home education and the additional regulation that will arise in that respect. It seems extraordinary, given that educational finance will be so restrained in the coming years, that we will have to spend such a huge amount of money on additional bureaucracy that seems, as the hon. Member for Surrey Heath said earlier, likely to follow in the tradition of this Secretary of State who believes that he can improve the education system through central direction and legislation.
	As the Liberal Democrats mentioned in the Queen's Speech debate, this is the 12th education Bill to come from the Labour Government. It was published only one week after we approved the last education Act, and, unbelievably, amends some of the measures in that Act. That shows the extraordinary tendency of the Labour Government and this Secretary of State to legislate and often to replace legislation before it has even bedded down.
	We also have serious concerns about the amount of time that will be available to debate the Bill. When one picks the Bill up, it does not look to be of the size and scale of the last education Act that we debated, or of some of the larger Bills that we are used to dealing with in the House, but it deals with extraordinarily important and sensitive issues, and the debate that we will need to have on some of those issues will be considerable, but we will be trying to do that in only two weeks. We need to consider the range of issues that we will be trying to resolve in those two weeks. We will be trying to debate major new proposals on home education that are extremely controversial and difficult. As the right hon. Member for North-West Durham has said, we will be debating new and controversial plans to allow the release of sensitive information from the family courts. Those proposals are opposed by many outside bodies. We will be debating controversial and important proposals on a new licensing arrangement for teachers. We will also be discussing the introduction of a new school report card, of new arrangements for school improvement partners, of new pupil and parent guarantees and of new arrangements for home-school agreements. Other issues to be discussed include the whole future of the primary school curriculum, which the Bill deals with in one clause, the important issue of personal, social and health education, which has already stirred some debate in this place, and the powers of governing bodies. Those are only some of the issues to be debated, and the Secretary of State and the usual channels have not allowed anything like enough time properly to scrutinise those issues. He cannot be surprised if the Liberal Democrats indicate that we do not want many of those proposals to go through in a half-baked or half-scrutinised way before the general election that we know the Government are having to rush this Bill through before.
	Let me make some brief comments about the parts of the Bill that we support and those that we will be seeking to amend.
	There are two small but important areas that we support unreservedly. The first is the new status for, and access too, PSHE education, although we are not entirely convinced that the change goes far enough in some areas. Secondly, we support, as I believe that the hon. Member for Surrey Heath did, the measures on special educational needs; we think that they are beneficial and helpful.
	We share some of the concerns that the hon. Gentleman expressed about bureaucracy in relation to the school report card and the licence to teach, although I do not think that we would put them in as critical a way as he did. We are more optimistic, or more open-minded, than him about the potential for those two matters to lead to improvements, if the measures that the Government introduce address them in the right way. The current mechanisms for school accountability are not particularly effective, and they do not give us a very good measure of the performance of many schools, particularly those that do not have the most challenging catchments and are therefore able to coast along in the league tables without their performance being looked at closely.

David Laws: I agree that it is always helpful when we use language that people understand and that is accessible. There is a problem not only with people not understanding what PSHE means, but with the quality of what currently passes for PSHE education.
	The existing school accountability mechanisms are seriously deficient and the school report card has scope for improving the way in which schools are assessed. However, as I said in the debate on the Gracious Speech, there is a real risk that the Government will seek to put too many different measures into the school report card, that it will become a box-ticking exercise, and that as a consequence, as the hon. Member for Surrey Heath said, we will end up with schools simply ticking boxes and with an increasing number of schools appearing to reach the higher grade levels without any change or improvement in performance in the areas that really matter. If that is all that the school report card does, it will be a waste of time and a bureaucratic burden.
	We agree that it is quite wrong that the Department for Children, Schools and Families should be the organisation that oversees and produces the report card; there are clearly risks inherent in that. It seems obvious to us that Ofsted or, arguably, local authorities should be charged with that responsibility.
	We are somewhat more positive than hon. Gentleman about the potential of the licence to teach, but there is a great deal of confusion about what the licence to teach is meant to deliver. The Government first spun the idea, when the Bill was published, as a measure to get rid of poor-performing teachers. The Secretary of State knows perfectly well what I mean by "spin". In a lot of the recent documentation that has come from the Government, the presentation has been all about CPD-that is, continuing professional development; the hon. Member for Nottingham, North (Mr. Allen) would have picked me up on that if I had not been clear about what it was. The Government have to be clear about which of the two they seek to deliver. There is a real risk that the proposals could, if the Government are not careful, become another expensive, bureaucratic burden.
	The Government need to focus on the ability of the licensing process to deal with poorly performing teachers, including in circumstances that are not dealt with under the existing performance management regime, such as those that the hon. Gentleman mentioned. Head teachers seek to take action against poorly performing teachers by using existing mechanisms, but those teachers leave before they have been put through the performance review. They then simply turn up in other schools, where they are able to teach very poorly. That is a real issue. It raises difficult questions, but those questions are worth exploring.
	Our three greatest concerns about the Bill relate to three areas: home education, the pupil and parent guarantees, and the matter that the right hon. Member for North-West Durham mentioned, the release of sensitive information in the family court. We accept the Government's good intent in seeking to ensure high-quality home education for all children, and we recognise the evidence that was given by the local authorities. Obviously, it is extremely controversial evidence, and it is very difficult to get a reliable data set, but it is argued that 8 per cent. of home-educated children may not be receiving a good education, and that 20 per cent. may be receiving a poor education. We recognise, as I think all Opposition Members do, that local authorities already have a duty to ensure that all children receive a suitable education.

David Laws: I accept that they are highly speculative. None of us can possibly know what the right numbers are, but the hon. Gentleman, who is, I believe, a member of the Children, Schools and Families Committee, signed up to a report that includes a lot of information about the patchy quality of home education. Some parents and families did not see themselves as having a duty to continue home education beyond key stage 2. He also signed up to a report that said-the Secretary of State quoted this earlier:
	"In our view it is unacceptable that local authorities do not know accurately how many children of school age in their area are in school, are being home educated or are otherwise not in school."
	We agree that there is a real issue, but the challenge for the Government is to get the balance right, and we do not believe that they have done so. We agree with many of the criticisms made in the Select Committee's report, and we would like to suggest the potential for consensus on a number of points, because on such subjects, it is important to seek to come to a conclusion, if we can, before this Parliament ends.
	The one area on which we do not agree with the Select Committee is on its conclusion that any scheme of notification or registration should be voluntary. It seems strange that the Committee can, in one sentence-the sentence that the Secretary of State cited earlier-say that it is unacceptable that local authorities do not know accurately how many children of school age in their area are in school, being home educated, or not in school. It may be that that element of the Committee's conclusions reflected a desire to gain a compromise between individuals with very different views. I am not a member of the Committee, so I do not know whether that is true, but that is certainly the impression given.
	However, we have concerns about two issues. The first is the nature of the registration process and whether the Government are in danger of presuming to be able to judge, at this stage, what a suitable education is, and of presuming to give individuals in local authorities the power to take away people's ability to home educate when there is no clarity about what a suitable home education is. Under the Government's proposals, individuals will not only be required to notify local authorities, but effectively be registering, and by registering, will be required to prove their ability to home educate and prove that they are delivering a suitable education.
	I put it to the Secretary of State that the only way that local authorities can reasonably do that job is by having a set of very detailed criteria about what home education is. Necessarily, the concern of home educators is that if the Government or local authorities seek to do that job without any agreement on what a suitable home education is, many individuals could suddenly find themselves having to comply with exactly the type of rigid state education that they have tried to escape by leaving formal schooling and going into home education.
	Secondly, it is very regrettable that education and safeguarding have become so mixed up in the Badman report. An assumption that local authority inspectors should have to check whether all home educators meet safeguarding requirements is inappropriate. The scope for local authorities is to consider whether a suitable education, however defined, is being given, not to assume automatically that local authority inspectors should look at the safeguarding circumstances. The intrusiveness in that part of the Bill is quite extraordinary.
	Under the Bill, a local authority must ascertain the child's wishes in relation to home education in all circumstances. It must check on the child's welfare in all circumstances, automatically assuming therefore the duty to prove that there are no welfare concerns, rather than simply picking up any that arise. In addition, a local authority must make at least one home visit and hold one meeting with the child each year. The cost-benefit analysis assumes that 100 per cent. of children will receive one in-year visit, with 50 per cent. receiving additional monitoring. There is a description of the statement of education, which has not yet been clarified in its detail but must be produced. In other words, the change in the regulation of home education is very significant and will mean that home education is regulated as never before.
	We would like to suggest a way to improve the current regime, without perhaps creating some of the problems of the disproportionate response that are involved in the Government's proposals. First, we do not support the voluntary approach that the Select Committee advocates, but we suggest in the first instance that the Secretary of State ought to consider whether the scheme could involve notification, rather than registration. Notification would oblige everyone who is home educating to declare that information, without undertaking a registration process initially that proves in some way the suitability of the education.
	Secondly, we suggest that a review over a longer time scale is needed, to consider what suitability means in home education. It would be dangerous to give local authority officials the responsibility for making judgments on suitability without any detailed guidance. I put it to the Secretary of State that we are simply not able to give that guidance, based on the debate so far and those that we are likely to have in Committee.
	Thirdly, we obviously want more support for home educators and more training for those local authority staff who must oversee such things, and we will debate that in Committee. I should have thought that that was an area of common ground. The Government would have a better chance of gaining a consensus if we separated educational inspection from safeguarding. That has been one of the things that home educators have found most provocative. We would like the process to focus on the quality of education, not on safeguarding. We would like the Government to reflect again on how they can introduce a much lighter touch inspection regime, where the actions taken by local authorities are proportionate to the perceived risk, rather than presuming that every home-educating household in the country must be inspected in the ways set out in the Bill.
	I hope that the Secretary of State is willing to take those proposals seriously. Outside the Committee's proceedings, we would be willing to take part in cross-party talks with himself and the hon. Member for Surrey Heath if that is necessary to try to reach an agreement on proposals that could command cross-party support.
	The second area about which we have considerable concerns is the pupil and parent guarantees and, tied to that, the home-school agreements. I shall not rehearse all the objections, because they came out very effectively from the exchanges, or lack of exchanges in some ways, between the hon. Gentleman and the Secretary of State. It was interesting that the Secretary of State failed to explain why the one-to-one tuition guarantee in primary education is different from that in secondary schools. There was no explanation of why the Government know better than head teachers and schools about whether tuition should be delivered one to one or in small groups and why one model is right for primary schools and another is right for secondary schools.
	The Association of School and College Leaders and the TUC are right to criticise such measures and to say that they could open the floodgates to increased litigation, that they could involve a huge bureaucratic burden, and that the problem with pupil and parent guarantees in so many areas is that they are not meaningful, not always deliverable and not rationally designed. Many hon. Members would not object to some of the pupil and parent guarantees if they were meaningful, sensible and respected the fact that the Secretary of State does not know better than 23,500 schools across the country how to run education.
	In our last debate, I gave a particularly striking example from the list of 38 pupil and parent guarantees that relates to pupil guarantee 5. I invite the Secretary of State to respond in a way that he did not last time and to tell me how on earth the local government ombudsman is remotely supposed to police guarantee 5, which says that
	"every 11-14 year-old enjoys relevant and challenging learning in all subjects, and develops their personal, learning and thinking skills so that they have strong foundations to make their 14-19 choices."
	That is motherhood and apple pie, and we are not supposed to know whether or not all schools are doing that-presumably, they are not, as we are told in the White Paper:
	"This will be phased in by September 2010."
	I put it to the Secretary of State that it is not only impossible to measure a supposed guarantee that is so loosely defined, but impossible for the local government ombudsman to police it, yet it is possible that a parent might want to refer a complaint under that guarantee to the local government ombudsman.
	We have already debated guarantee 13, which relates to one-to-one or small group tuition. It is totally unclear why the arrangements for primary and secondary schools are different, why there should be one-to-one education in one setting and education in small groups in another, and why a certain number of sessions should be guaranteed, rather than focusing on the outputs. I should have thought that that was one of the things that the Secretary of State had learned during his time at the Treasury.
	On the parental guarantees-Nos. 5, 6 and 7-that relate to home-school agreements, it is unclear why the Government should make them compulsory for every school in the country. Why on earth do we need to make home-school agreements compulsory, even in schools that do not regard them as beneficial? Why is it necessary to personalise them for each child, when that will add enormously to the bureaucratic costs, which must therefore be regarded as unrealistic, as shown in the cost-benefit analysis associated with the Bill.
	The third area about which we have major concerns is that of family courts and access to sensitive information. That is, of course, a Home Office lead issue, but as we will have no one with Home Office responsibilities involved in the Bill, I should like to make some comments. This is the one area on which we as an Opposition party have so far received the greatest criticism from outside bodies, not only children's bodies such as Barnardo's, the NSPCC, the Interdisciplinary Alliance for Children and the National Children's Bureau, but the Bar Council, Resolution-the much-respected family law group-and the department of social policy at the university of Oxford.
	All those representations have a common theme. They accept the need to make family courts more transparent, but they believe that the proposals are rushed and lack sufficient consultation. They cannot understand why they are being pushed through at the same time as other measures to pilot the improved transparency of court decisions are only just being rolled out. All those groups believe that sensitive information linked to individuals could be released and that such legislation could be against the interests of children and deter them from giving evidence in some cases.
	Almost universally, those outside groups have proposed a number of solutions to the deficiencies that they see in the Bill. They believe that any change should follow an independent evaluation of the April 2009 changes, which are only just being piloted. They believe that any changes should be delayed so that there is time for consultation and consideration in relation to these new and controversial proposals, which seem to have been driven through only to meet the needs of a number of lobby groups in the media. They also believe that if the proposals are to be implemented, they need to take into account the delay and cost implications of going through each case in turn, and look at assessments about any reporting restrictions that are necessary.
	We have three major concerns about the Bill, and we hope that the Government will be willing to listen to them. If not, we hope that a large part of the Bill will not go through before the dissolution of Parliament. The Bill could have concentrated on areas where we might have found some consensus with the Government, in particular the need to reform the funding of young people from disadvantaged backgrounds, the need to introduce a pupil premium with real additional money, not money simply shifted around the system, the urgent need to restore credibility in relation to educational standards, which has not happened so far in spite of the earlier comments from the Secretary of State, and the need to devolve more power and freedom throughout the system, rather than accruing more power to the Secretary of State and introducing more bureaucracy.
	The Bill is disappointing. We will do our best over the next few weeks constructively to amend some of the key parts of it, but at this stage we intend to vote against it and we hope that most of it will not get on to the statute book.

Kate Hoey: There is probably nothing more important to our future as a prosperous country than the need to ensure that every child has an excellent education. I feel very grateful for the education that I had at my local country primary school, Lylehill in County Antrim, and my wonderful grammar school, Belfast Royal Academy. Despite a few people trying to close all the grammar schools in Northern Ireland, they are still operating and doing extremely well.
	On the country primary school, I realise that such a Bill cannot include everything, but we should remember that in 2006 the Government launched the Learning Outside the Classroom manifesto, which aimed to give every school student the opportunity to experience out-of-classroom learning in the natural environment, yet in 2008 well over half of all school-aged children would never have had a visit to the countryside or an opportunity to understand anything about the countryside. I feel particularly strongly about that because I am the chairman of the Countryside Alliance and, more importantly, because of my inner-city schools. Using a great deal of charitable money and donations, we try to get all the primary schools in my constituency at least one visit to the countryside. That makes such a difference to the children. I hope that can be considered.
	There are many aspects of the Bill with which I agree, because some of them will help to ensure an excellent education, but I share some of the concerns expressed to me by head teachers that many of the proposals in the Bill could have waited or are not necessary and will add more bureaucracy to schools, particularly to the heads. Much more time and money will be spent on ticking more boxes to satisfy monitors about things that do not necessarily need to be monitored or could have been monitored in a different way, especially where schools have good leadership.
	Previous speakers have commented on home-school agreements. I cannot understand how all the effort, work, time and money involved will improve by a single iota the education of a child in primary school.

Robert Key: The hon. Member for Vauxhall (Kate Hoey) is neither a light touch nor a soft touch; she is a very fine parliamentarian, and it is a privilege to follow her excellent speech.
	Every progressive civilisation has depended for its success on the quality of the education of its citizens, both male and female. I have observed, over almost 27 years as a Member, that the most important thing in politics is ideas, open minds and progress. That has been the great tradition of western democracy since the age of enlightenment, but the greatest ideas are usually ruined by rules and regulations and the fine print that follows them, and I am bound to conclude that the authors of this Bill could not see the wood for the trees.
	That is why I commend the intellectual approach of my hon. Friend the Member for Surrey Heath (Michael Gove), and I pay tribute to all who have followed their vocation to teach, just as I did when I left university. I faced my first class in a county secondary modern school in Cornwall; I then went to Leeds grammar school, which was an education in several senses. In my first job as a qualified teacher, I went to Loretto school in Scotland, and I am proud to be a Scottish-registered teacher; and then I spent 14 years at Harrow school. In all those schools, the quality of leadership and the scholarship of the teaching staff guaranteed the quality of education for all the pupils. That is still true, and that is why my hon. Friend is right. The issue is about a partnership between parents and teachers, with the state providing funding, unless we are talking about the independent sector, which has such an important role to play.
	In my last few weeks as a Member, I do not mind saying that it is no good being rude about schools such as Eton and the people who go there. First, they do not choose to do so; their parents do; and secondly, those schools are often the best in the world. All of us should seek to elevate the quality of education throughout the country to the best that can be achieved. It is foolish to deny that.

Robert Key: In responding to the distinguished Chairman of the Children, Schools and Families Committee, I should say only that that is why, ever since 1946, the independent sector has endeavoured always to broaden its interest and intake and to provide more scholarships. But what has been the response? All the scholarships that were available to poorer children have been restricted, and since this Government came to power no scholarship amounting to more than 50 per cent. of the fees has been allowed. That is a retrogressive policy, and I deplore it.
	I fear that the Bill has missed the point. As Baroness Lady Walmsley pointed out in the other place, we have had more than 1,200 regulations since 1997, and they have added up in words to more than the combined works of Shakespeare. That is not clever, and I agreed so much with Lord Sacks, who, in the other place on 26 November 2009, reminded us that not everything that matters can be measured; not everything that counts can be counted; and not everything that is valuable can be valued at a price. Of course, that is true.
	As a veteran of the 1983 Select Committee on Education, Science and Arts and, I think, the only survivor of the Committee stage of the 1988 GERBIL, the great Education Reform Bill, of the now distinguished peer, Lord Baker, I can observe that the Bill before us is really not worth most of the paper on which it is written. Clause 23 alone, on the licence to practice, would be enough to erode the morale and confidence of most of the teaching profession.
	There is, however, an aspect of the Bill to which I want to refer, because I support it strongly. That aspect is represented by clauses 10 to 14, on personal, social, health and economic education. It is a clumsy phrase, and I absolutely agree with the hon. Member for Nottingham, North (Mr. Allen) that, if we can think up something snappier that means something to people, so much the better. However, parents are responsible for providing a moral dimension to the education of their children, and, in my ideal world, where marriage would be the norm but stable relationships would be the best equivalent for everybody else, parents would take on that responsibility.
	Such education would be not just about the biology of sex, but about the moral framework-about marriage, stable relationships and all those virtuous things that lead to stable communities and a stable society. We cannot force parents to do it, however. Some parents do not want to; some do not think that they are very good at it; and some would rather that doctors or, indeed, teachers did it instead. Someone must do it, however, and after more than 25 years as a Member one of my regrets is that Parliament and successive Governments have failed to encourage young people, over several generations, towards a more mature understanding at an earlier age of how to respect their bodies, friends and communities. It is much better that teachers should do this than pornographers, drug-pushers, people-traffickers or criminals, and that is why clauses 10 to 14 should be supported.
	The hon. Member for Nottingham, North said that people outside this place, on the estates and in schools and communities, do not have a clue what this is all about. I think he is right. In fact, it is worse than that, because most people inside this House do not have a clue what it is about either. Those of us who have been here for a long time and have been talking to our education authorities, social workers and hospitals-accident and emergency departments, and so on-realise the enormous challenge that young people face nowadays that we did not face when we were their age.
	The whole question of sexually transmitted infections is now the biggest public health issue in most of our constituencies, and that is fuelled by access to alcohol and its low price: it all goes together. That is why I very much welcome clause 11, particularly subsection (4), which defines, from paragraphs (a) to (g), exactly what is meant by personal, social, health and economic education. In terms of public health, we must be hard-nosed and realistic about the temptations faced by young people on our streets in our constituencies on Friday and Saturday nights, with large volumes of alcohol, binge drinking and irresponsibility all around. That can lead only to the A and E department of a hospital, where one will find, if one asks people quietly, that on a Saturday night they receive teenage girls who have had between 20 and 30 units of alcohol over a period of four or five hours, and who are legless and likely to have engaged in sexual activity that has been dangerous for them. In all this, do we not usually blame the girls? Is it not those bad gals who cause all the trouble because they are the ones who get pregnant and cause all the teenage pregnancies? In fact, it is the young men who cause the trouble, not the girls, and it is time that we addressed that. I hope that the Bill will lead to a huge improvement in the quality of education of our young people that takes on board the importance of educating young men, just as much as young women, about their social responsibilities and relationships.
	I mention in parenthesis a remarkable phenomenon that should be happening right across the country-the emergence of street pastors. I helped to launch a street pastor scheme in Salisbury last autumn. These people are not busybodies who wish to go about preaching to young people-far from it. They want to be there quietly to help at critical moments at times of critical decisions when young people-it is usually young people, but not exclusively-have had a little more to drink than they should and have to decide whether to stop or how far to go. For those young people to find alongside them experienced, trained people to whom they can talk is proving to be a great benefit, certainly in Salisbury and I believe elsewhere.
	I commend the report on alcohol published last week by the Select Committee on Health, because that, too, recognises the significance of cheap alcohol. I have come to the conclusion over all these years-Parliament has been discussing this for 26 years, to my certain knowledge-that we have gone much too far in making alcohol cheap and more widely available. We will not address this problem satisfactorily until we go for minimum unit pricing, and we will have to start to restrict the number of outlets and police the whole thing much better. If one asks any police force, certainly mine in Salisbury-Salisbury, for goodness' sake: that wonderful, safe, beautiful city, which has so few problems compared with most-one will find that 80 per cent. of crime is still committed by people with alcohol-related intent. That is the bottom line, and we really must do something about it.
	Then we come to the whole question of the education of our children and how we can best get it across. I make a plea that this Government, in their dying days, and the incoming Government carry on from where my hon. Friend the Member for Surrey Heath started in bearing in mind the intellectual approach to take towards education. Before rushing into the thicket of undergrowth and muddle that is in the Bill, the House should bear in mind that British education is still the envy of the world, that English is still the most important language in the world, and that it is our duty to future generations to uphold the primacy of ideas over regulation. It is our duty, as a nation, to guard with pride the intellectual endeavour of western Christendom and western civilisation, and that depends on the quality of our education.

Caroline Flint: It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Salisbury (Robert Key). I remember that when I was Public Health Minister there was much that we could agree on, as in his speech today, as regards young people and their health, opportunities and aspirations in life.
	I am pleased to speak in the debate on the Second Reading of the Children, Schools and Families Bill. As an MP of 13 years, I have seen a lot of changes in my constituency. Back in 1997, our aspiration was just to get indoor toilets in so many of our schools with dilapidated buildings and terrible outside toilets that were not a joy for the pupils, the teachers or the cleaning staff. Since that time, we have seen the refurbishment of very many schools, with more than £100 million spent on new school buildings. We have three new secondary academies and four specialist schools. We have seen improvements across Doncaster, although I would be the first to admit that there is still some way to go. In 1998, 34 per cent. of our pupils got five A to C-grade GCSEs. If one compares that with the proportion in 2009-71 per cent.-there is no doubt that there have been changes, not only through resources but reforms that have meant that the outcomes and prospects for many children in Don Valley and Doncaster are better than they were some years ago.
	The Bill tries to look further at how we get the right balance between rights and responsibilities, not only for schools and staff but for pupils and parents. I congratulate my right hon. and hon. Friends on the Front Bench on seeking further to address these important issues. As a former member of the Education and Employment Committee, as it was then, I know only too well how important leadership is in schools. Under the chairmanship of my right hon. Friend the Member for Barking (Margaret Hodge), we undertook an inquiry into the role of the head teacher in that context. To be honest, nothing changes-the head teacher's role as leader of a school was as important then as it was decades before, and it is as important today as it will be in future. More support should be given to head teachers in tackling underperforming teachers in their schools. If that is not done, it does not serve the school, the pupils or their parents, and it certainly does not serve other teachers who are having to cover for those who are not up to the job.
	A lot has already been said-I will not repeat it-about pupil and parent guarantees and home school agreements. I think I understand why my right hon. and hon. Friends want to enshrine guarantees for pupils and parents in our communities, which is a worthy aspiration. However, I am concerned about how they will be enforced and understood by pupils and parents, and about exactly what would trigger the point at which a parent might go to the local government ombudsman to tackle an issue they are worried about. Alongside that, I am concerned about what this might mean in terms of the time taken and the number of cases that the ombudsman might have to take on. Over several years as an MP, I have had to work on behalf of constituents with the local government ombudsman, and I know that they are not exactly underworked in relation to the number of cases that they have to take up in a whole host of other areas. I hope that that will get further attention in Committee.
	On home-school agreements, as a parent rather than as an MP I have seen three children go through GCSEs, A-levels and degrees under a Labour Government, and two are currently looking to do postgraduate qualifications as well. Before that, I happened to have them attending a school that was already providing home-school agreements, which the Government of the time had not enshrined in law. The agreements are important, as it is important for a parent when their child starts a school, whether primary or secondary, to have a baseline of what is expected from them and their children. They should also know what they can expect from the school, both in standards of education and in pastoral support, which is very important for children's well-being.
	I am concerned about where home-school agreements are going and how much more work might be needed to personalise each one to meet the needs of every child. Hon. Members have outlined that concern in this debate. As a parent, I hope that when it comes to the educational needs of my children, and those of my constituents and of every parent in the country, that personalised attention takes place through their form tutor in each year group. Parents engage in their child's education in different ways, such as through the parents' meetings that they should have and the information that they receive about their child's success or otherwise. That should be an ongoing process, and I am concerned that we may be trying to mix that up with home-school agreements too much.
	Another point that I wish to make about home-school agreements was made to me by a head teacher in my constituency recently. Clarity is needed about the consequences for those parents who do not abide by their responsibilities. In most schools, as the agreements stand, an overwhelming majority of parents fulfil what is expected of them. A very small minority do not, and that could be to do with attendance at school, supporting the improvement in their child's behaviour and so on. Head teachers tell me they do not really know where they should go and what they should do when that breaks down completely. The Bill mentions the courts and parenting orders, but some of the head teachers to whom I have talked do not realise that they can already use parenting orders. We need to ensure that where they already have powers, they know how to use them appropriately.
	The matter needs attention, and a parenting order, parenting contract or acceptable behaviour contract-whatever we want to call it-may be necessary. At the moment, as with all sorts of matters to do with rights and responsibilities, the question is what to do when the responsibilities are not taken on and what sanctions there are to make a parent engage. The vast majority of parents do so, even those who are having difficulties and challenges with their children, but some refuse, and teachers often feel that there is not a lot they can do.
	The new duty on local authorities requires them proactively to seek parents' views on the range and quality of secondary school places in their area. I am interested in that, and I understand that it is focused on the year 5 age group. Perhaps there is something to be said for asking parents of children in other year groups, who have already gone into secondary education, what they think about the experience and the choice.
	I was concerned recently when I took up a case on behalf of a Catholic primary school in my constituency. The local education authority was going to cease to provide funds for buses for the children from that school in Edlington, a deprived area by anyone's measures, to go to a local Catholic secondary school. I understand that there have also been cuts in bus services to other schools. There are four specialist schools in my constituency, and part of the role of specialist schools was to offer children who excelled in a particular specialism the opportunity to go to them. If local authorities cut the means of transport to them, what choice is there for those children's parents? That needs to be attended to.
	I very much support the idea that schools should consider supporting the wider community and be able to use their delegated budgets to invest in doing so. Given the amount of money that has gone into improving our schools and building new ones, it seems only right that we should see them in the context of the wider community. There should be opportunities for other community organisations to benefit from a school's facilities, but also to help schools and work with them on the issue of families in the community. There are other community organisations that can help the staff of schools provide better for their pupils.
	I would also like schools to have an opportunity to have far more control over their finances in planning ahead. There have been headlines recently about the number of schools sitting on reserves. I shall not justify or defend schools that sit on huge amounts of money that could be better spent in their school community, but there are times when a school has to plan ahead for its needs, for example when year groups are changing and a large number of children are coming into the school because of the number of births locally. That will have an impact on spending in that school and the number of staff it needs to employ. In one year, school numbers might go up-

Andrew Turner: I must confess that I find the Bill, and particularly the provisions for the regulation of home schooling, deeply troubling. I am sure that many Members will raise the issue, so I shall endeavour to be brief.
	Education is the gateway to a better world. Nothing should be done to prevent children from flourishing and learning in the environment best suited to them, in school or out. As many Members on both sides of the House have acknowledged, education is primarily a parent's responsibility, not that of the Government. It is up to parents to select the form of education most beneficial to their children. For a variety of reasons, the schools system is not for everyone. Some just choose the home; others fear bullying or the increasing size of schools and the associated problems, and some children are not allowed to thrive within the system.
	Although every child must receive an education, schools are not the only way to deliver it. Obviously, such a gap can be filled by the work of parents through home schooling their children. It is estimated that between 20,000 and 80,000 are currently home schooled. Though some may disagree, I argue that home educators understand the responsibility placed on them. They understand that the responsibility for a child's schooling falls on nobody but the parents. Unfortunately, in yet another example of a Government obsessed with conformity, the independence that home educators currently enjoy is to be placed under threat. The plans in clause 26 to ensure that home educators conform with the requirements of the national syllabus will stamp out the individuality that many home educated children cherish. Is not the whole point of home schooling the provision of an alternative channel for education?
	Before Christmas I met a group of constituents, all home educators, who were concerned about the recommendations of the Badman report. I also met some of their children, who were some of the most articulate and erudite young people I have met. Most of the parents spoke of having schedules for teaching, but in keeping with educational flexibility so as to best fit a child's needs. One of them told me of her son spontaneously developing a liking for Roman history. Because she retained responsibility for her son's best interests, she was able to take a trip to a Roman villa the next week. Such a trip would have been impossible under the annual education plans that the Bill may well set in stone. If modern society has taught us anything, it is that we have to acknowledge everyone's uniqueness. The Bill appears designed to move us in the opposite direction.
	My other concern revolves around the level to which the Bill extends the state yet further into people's lives. One of its provisions is to allow local education authorities, when neither child nor parent objects, to interview home-schooled children on their own. The phrasing of that part of the Bill, particularly the use of the word "may", has been constructed far too loosely to be of reliable guidance. How can a measure confer a power on a local authority without detailing the full criteria for fulfilling that responsibility? Furthermore, under the Bill, interviews will be conducted in
	"a place where education is provided to the child".
	From a civil liberties perspective, that paints a dangerous picture of approving authorities' incursion into private homes.
	What would be the consequences of a parent's not consenting at any stage to a child's being interviewed on their own? Such interviews may place the child in a distressing environment. They also underline the contradictions at the heart of the Government's approach. Pupils are not interviewed about teachers, so why should sons and daughters be interviewed about their mothers and fathers? Furthermore, interviewing children alone gives the impression that parents are not to be trusted or have done something wrong. Indeed, the level at which the Government aim to monitor parent-child relationships is tantamount to saying that a parent willing to spend time with their child is somehow in the wrong.
	Such intrusiveness into parents' lives is bad enough, but the detrimental effects on children's education and well-being are even more dangerous. The Government seriously need to reconsider the case for granting the new powers and requirements-not only the powers, but the Government's perspective on the issue. I understand the Government's wish to achieve the best for everyone, but their methods simply do not work.
	Before attending to home education, the Government must first deal with those already in the system who do not achieve as they should. They should tackle those who are absent from education partially or altogether. Too many bright futures have been sucked into the mire of destructive social circumstances. The Bill is directed at the wrong children in the wrong fashion.
	Indeed, no Bill has dealt successfully with those who have sex when under 16. Conception rates for those under 16 have increased from 7.8 to 8.3 per 1,000, which is 8,200 pregnancies. Those children are far too young to become parents.
	Of course, I am aware that children's well-being is one of the Bill's motivations. The Government are concerned that home schooling may be used as a cover for child abuse or forced marriages. Certainly, that must be dealt with, but in a far more consultative manner. Greater consideration must be given to the vast majority of home-schooled children who benefit immensely from their parents' dedicated work.
	A scheme of self-regulation, rather than imposed conformity, is the best way to balance children's education with children's safety. One must not be sacrificed for the other, because education is the gateway to a better world. The longer we prevaricate on the most fundamental decisions and the longer we institute misguided legislation such as the Bill, the longer we deny the next generation the greatest opportunity to realise their fullest potential.

Barry Sheerman: When I first examined the Bill, it made me consider how best to assess a measure on Second Reading. I have the advantage of chairing the Children, Schools and Families Committee, and therefore the further advantage of considering, in the past two years, the three main pillars on which educational reform was founded 20 years ago. My remarks today are in that context.
	We have considered testing and assessment and the national curriculum and, last week, we published our report on school accountability. The Bill is about all those matters. The measure is a bit of curate's egg. All Governments should learn that legislation is best when it has been tested and piloted or, if not, given to people who genuinely know about the subject so that they can conduct an independent inquiry. Even better, if there is time, is a pre-legislative inquiry by the Select Committee. We have not conducted such an inquiry on the Bill.
	Let me comment quickly on some long overdue aspects, beginning with the special educational needs provisions. The Lamb inquiry was set up by the then Education and Skills Committee, predecessor of our current Committee. It made strong recommendations on special educational needs and was a fine report-I think that one member of that Committee is still in the Chamber this evening. We made strong recommendations for giving special educational needs students a proper chance so that they are not faced with a patchwork of provision throughout the country, with provision depending on where they happen to live. Some students and families were getting the right support while others got poor support.
	I note that the Bill does not contain something to which we always thought we would go back-one never has time to revert to all the things that one discovers when conducting an inquiry. It is the dreadful lack of capacity, support and opportunity for special educational needs students when they get to 16. That is crucial. The ages of 16 to 18 are extremely difficult for special needs students, even when they have had a good deal, good support, been statemented and got everything that they should have. The ages of 16 to 18 are difficult, as are the ages beyond. Perhaps the Select Committee will have time to revert to that.
	I was more hesitant about the reform of the primary curriculum and about including Sir Jim Rose's proposals and recommendations in legislation. Our report on the national curriculum showed that we need a much more coherent approach. People ought to know where they are travelling, starting at the earliest stage, when a child is born, and continuing right through to the ages of 18 and 19. There should be a coherent national curriculum that joins up. At the moment, we have bits of curriculum and great disjunctions in it. The most famous happens at the age of 11, but they happen even at 7, and then at 16 and 18. A person setting out on the journey of life and education is not, even with best endeavours, offered a curriculum that makes sense to both the child and the parent.
	Jim Rose conducted an inquiry on the primary national curriculum, and there was also the Cambridge inquiry, which the Government did not like as much, but neither inquiry was right. The results did not mesh with what comes afterwards or with the important foundation stage, which the Select Committee supports wholeheartedly. Bits of the curriculum for specific years are taken, an inquiry is conducted and proposals are made, without seeing those bits as part of one offering.
	Most of us agree that putting personal, social, health and economic education on the timetable is a good idea. I am not sure whether it should be in the national curriculum; when we examined the national curriculum, we said it was overfull. We pointed out that academies had much more choice and flexibility and could choose their priorities after the basic subjects had been included in the national curriculum. We asked why, if that approach was good enough for them, it was not good enough for the rest of the schools.
	The national curriculum is too full. Although I like the idea of everyone having decent PSHE education, simply placing it in a compulsory curriculum, which is already full, without changing it and granting more flexibility, is worrying. Ken Boston once told me that the trouble with PSHE and things like it is that they are given to the gym teacher with the gammy knee to teach. We need high-quality people who are trained to do PSHE well if it is going to be taught to its full extent.

Barry Sheerman: My hon. Friend may well have won me over. What I was trying to get at is that I would have liked a real, holistic change to the national curriculum, so that the vital PSHE fits in well.
	On the accountability framework, the Committee published a report on accountability last week. We looked at the matter right through from governing bodies to Ofsted and the new school report card. We found in favour of the school report card and rather liked the school improvement strategies that it underpinned. However, we also found that Governments only ever introduce new forms of accountability, and never take one away, and we are worried that there are now five levels of accountability. The Government are well intentioned and want to move away from the reliance on the publication of tables of the results of tests and examinations, and the school report card will help, but I suspect that it will not be enough to strike the balance that most people in our schools-heads and teachers-want.
	Heads and teachers feel tremendous pressure from the different forms of accountability. In particular, they are very worried about accountability through Ofsted. The Committee found Ofsted to be over-large and overburdened-it has now extended into child protection-and we wonder whether the day and a half long inspection is as good as it could be. Does a lighter-touch inspection, if it is too light, lead the Ofsted inspectors to rely much more heavily on the statistics and test results that they read on the card before they go into the school to do an assessment? The school is where the vital thing happens, but the quality of teaching in the classroom carries much less weight in the balance.
	On the licence to practise, I take it that at last we have got to the stage-this seems to be the subtext-at which we have a highly regarded work force with proper qualifications and a five-year renewable licence. I believe that that is probably the way to go, but we will not get there without offering high quality continuing professional development. Death by PowerPoint is not the way to deliver CPD. CPD must be high quality and delivered alongside that licence to practise. I suspect that part of the Government's agenda with the licence to practise will be to weed out teachers who are not up to the job, which I suppose is a very important aspect of it.
	Lastly, the Committee wrote a good report on home-educated children, and the matter has been much discussed in interventions. A very significant percentage of home-educated children are wonderfully educated. I was very impressed by the parents and children I met, but I also believe that we must know where our children are. The Committee came to a compromise view. As the Government were offering a system with a compulsory register with no fines, action, penalties or sanctions, we asked them whether they should try a voluntary system for two years as an olive branch. We said that if that method did not work, the Government should go for a compulsory system.
	That was a rattle through the issues. There are some good and some not-so-good provisions in the Bill, but we could say that of all Bills.

Graham Allen: It is always a pleasure to follow my friend, the hon. Member for North-West Norfolk (Mr. Bellingham). He delivers his speeches like he plays his cricket, with a stout defence and the occasional flashing, brilliant shot, but also with the tendency to take his eye off the ball on occasions-a tendency that I shall avoid the temptation to take advantage of this evening, because we are discussing such a serious issue, particularly for my constituents.
	I represent a constituency that sends the fewest number of kids to college and university, has the highest teenage pregnancy rate in western Europe, and has profound and severe problems of deprivation. That is why, for me, the most important thing in the Bill is what I would call the life skills part-the part dealing with teaching our babies, children, primary children and secondary young people the importance of some of the basics that most of us here learned at our mother and father's knees. Many of those skills-the basic social and emotional capabilities-are not in place in constituencies such as mine. If they are not there, we have a choice: either we can spend billions of pounds on remedial action when things go wrong, complain about the problem, turn our teachers into crowd control experts, put money into our courts and magistrates courts, and pay for people to spend a lifetime on welfare benefits; or we can do something about the problem. The great thing that the Bill does is take another step towards having the capability to help young people when they need it.
	PSHE, as it is called-we really have to do something about; we should change the name to something that means something to people on the ground, such as "life skills"-is not, on its own, a magic bullet; it is part of a package of early intervention measures. In Nottingham, we have been fortunate enough to put a number of those measures in place, but we need the rest of the jigsaw. Those children need to know that they can access the great world of learning because they have the skills and capabilities to do so-the skill to listen, the skill to pay attention, the skill to be self-disciplined, the ability to reconcile arguments without violence, the ability to aspire to learn, and the ability to want to get qualifications and go on and get a decent job. That is why the Bill is so important.

Graham Allen: My hon. Friend is absolutely right. That is why the first thing that we did in, effectively, our pilot-we are piloting the idea before the Government have introduced the legislation, through our 11-to-16 life skills programme, which I was fortunate enough to be instrumental in establishing, as chair of the local strategic partnership-was to dedicate some £400,000, from a very small budget, for basic training, so that the basic materials were in place. That was so that the teachers were not, as someone said earlier, teaching those basics after lessons in the gymnasium or running stuff off the photocopier, but understood the aim and were trained and passionate about ensuring that all young people had those basics in place.
	In addition, leaving aside a bit of petty partisanship from all parts of the House, I would like to say a few words of thanks-not in the normal way, perhaps-to the Front Benchers for the serious way in which they have debated the issue and, except for a bit of fraying around the edges on sex and relationships education, for the basic consensus on the fact that we need all our kids to have those fundamental life skills in order to take advantage of education. I commend the way in which all Front Benchers have done that. I should also like to add a little historical footnote to the debate, by mentioning the debt that we all owe to my right hon. Friend the Member for South Dorset (Jim Knight) for his work on this brief. He worked very hard to ensure that it was going to be part of the Bill, and he deserves our commendation for that.
	I say all this not because I am soft, non-partisan and not in favour of my own party's viewpoint on various issues, but because of one simple fact: if we ever break the intergenerational cycle of deprivation in this country, that achievement will not be the property of just one party-the Labour party, the Conservative party, the Liberal party or any of the minority parties. All will have to be signed up to the consensus on giving every child the abilities that will enable that child to make the best of him or herself. I think that we are quite close to achieving that.
	There was a period when the debate revolved around one side saying that the other side wanted to hug hoodies, and the other side retorting that their opponents wanted to put antisocial behaviour orders on embryos. However, the level of maturity in the debate over the past two or three years has been to the great credit of Members in the House and to the spokespeople here who have taken this issue much further than we thought we might have done. What is it that we have taken further? It is the process of early intervention, and the laying down of the bedrock that will enable all kids to do well, as part of a complete raft of measures, rather than just as a one-off.

Andrew Miller: I am intrigued by the debate we have had so far, which I have tried to place in the context of things that I have watched happen in my constituency since I was first elected in 1992. One of the first things I looked at in respect of education in the area was the desperate need to raise the ambitions of young people. That fits in with many of the remarks of my hon. Friend the Member for Nottingham, North (Mr. Allen).
	It is critical for the House to focus on education and to ask whether the Bill enhances what is happening locally. I shall put the Bill in the context of developments in my constituency that have brought positive benefits for the life chances of my constituents, how that has spilled over into trends in the area and whether the Bill improves the situation.
	The first major change was the development of a series of new primary schools. One of the best-managed private finance initiatives-I do not mind being bipartisan about it; it was brilliantly managed-was led by what was then Tory-controlled Cheshire county council, working in partnership with all the key customers including the young people themselves. It made a difference: that group of children felt that the school really did belong to them. The initiative, together with Sure Start, began to change the life chances of young people, and I have seen it develop.
	More recently, last September, we created a new academy, the University academy. It is the result of a fantastic partnership between Chester university, the local diocese and two secondary schools that have been merged. The close partnership with the university sector has resulted in new builds for both the academy and a further education college. Even in the few months involved, it has made a number of young people ask themselves a question about university: what is this mysterious place to which very few have aspired? It has already made a difference, and I commend it.
	I am pleased to see that my hon. Friend the Minister for Schools and Learners has returned to the Chamber. When he visited the academy, he witnessed the leadership that, after only a few months, is already starting to make a difference. He also witnessed the results of a different Labour investment when he visited Hammond school. I am sure he will recall the extraordinary talent of young people who had benefited from the specialist investment in dance and drama that had enabled state-funded pupils to get into that elite school. All that investment has transformed the life chances of people in my constituency, who are beginning to believe that they can do better than their predecessors.
	The hon. Member for Meirionnydd Nant Conwy (Mr. Llwyd), who knows my constituency, will be aware that there were periods when we had massive unemployment among people in their mid-teens, partly owing to recessions and technological change in the big manufacturing areas back in the mid-1980s. The children of that generation are now starting to aspire towards something different, and that is encouraging in itself. I view the Bill in the context of what is happening now. The most important of the guarantees mentioned in clause 1, to which no one has referred today, is the pupil ambition
	"for all pupils to go to schools where there is good behaviour, strong discipline, order and safety".
	That returns us to the heart of what was said by my hon. Friend the Member for Nottingham, North, and it must be seen in the context of a two-way trade. Students cannot attend a school at which they expect to enjoy good behaviour around them unless they are part of it themselves. We must work hard to ensure that a programme of that kind is enshrined in legislation as soon as possible.
	My second point relates to 21st-century schools. They need investment, and I believe that unless the investment programmes that I described earlier continue into the foreseeable future, it will not be possible for that part of the Bill to be delivered either. We need continued state investment, together with the ambitions set out in the Bill. Perhaps I can plug something to the Secretary of State. He visited a brilliant high school in my constituency in the week of the TUC conference last September, and saw the marvellous work being done in a shambolic set of buildings in Neston. I hope that the Government will move that school further up the list in the Building Schools for the Future programme.
	As we have heard, the Bill also deals with home education. I too have received representations, and my petition on the subject was presented by the hon. Member for Beverley and Holderness (Mr. Stuart), for which I am grateful. There have been some misapprehensions and misconceptions about the Bill. New section 19E in schedule 1 makes it clear that there is no requirement for children to attend sessions on their own with a representative of the local education authority. I would have objected strongly had there been any suggestion that a child could be required to attend such a meeting. There is an absolute right of objection in the draft provision, and I consider that very important.

Andrew Miller: I am not a lawyer, but new section 19E includes the words
	"unless the child or a parent of the child objects".
	New section 19G states-and I should like to this provision to be strengthened a little in Committee-that the regulations "may"-I think the word ought to be "should"-provide for the provision in new subsection (2)(b) enabling an extension of the registration period to be automatic in the event of an unwarranted draconian action of the kind described by the hon. Gentleman. I think that it is possible to find solutions.

Graham Stuart: New section 19F(1)(e) states that a local authority may revoke a registration
	"by reason of a failure to co-operate with the authority in arrangements made by them under section 19E".
	We need reassurance if we are to believe that parents will not be penalised.

Andrew Miller: I have referred the hon. Gentleman to new section 19G, which concerns appeals. The regulations should, in my view, provide for the registration to continue automatically in the event of an appeal.
	Finally, I wish to say a few words about special educational needs. In the old county council structure in Cheshire, a significant number of SEN appeals were conducted at a very high level by volunteers. People with little or no means were reliant upon the voluntary sector to make representations on behalf of their child within the appeals mechanisms. At the opposite, more wealthy, end of the county, however, people were represented by highly qualified lawyers. That cannot be right. We must have equality in the SEN appeals process. The right of access for those children whose cases need representation must be absolute, and there must also be fairness in the quality of that representation. Whatever the detail of the steps that will be taken to strengthen the process, I hope that my hon. Friend the Minister will ensure that children of all backgrounds have both a right of access and the right to the same quality of representation.
	This is an important Bill that builds upon the building blocks to which I have referred, and I hope that when it passes through Committee, it will emerge as a measure that helps to build further upon those building blocks. On that basis, I support the Bill.

Sandra Gidley: I am unsure whether my voice or my time will run out first, but I hope to concentrate on three issues: home education; personal, social and health education; and family courts.
	Schedule 1 to the Bill deals with the registration and monitoring of home-educated children, and it follows on from the Badman report, which gave rise to a significant number of concerns among home educators, who have done a fantastic job in lobbying parliamentarians. The right to interview children alone is a particular concern. The Government have listened, but it is clear from the debate that there are still significant concerns. If in Committee we can provide more reassurance that there will not be a heavy-handed lever for local authorities to use if they are not happy with what is going on, that will be welcomed by all.
	There are also concerns that the safeguarding agenda has been over-emphasised compared with education. Actually, the balance of words in the Badman report shows that that is probably not the case. Nevertheless, it was felt that part of the Badman report brief was to look at safeguarding. If a Government have restrictive measures in place and protect their own back, they can say, "But we did all of this to try to prevent such an event from happening." There is a timidity in respect of just allowing people to get on with their own lives, because I am not aware of a huge problem. That is not to say that one day there may not be a problem, but that will be an exception rather than the rule. We seem to be legislating for something that might happen in very exceptional circumstances.
	Registration is key. It would be welcomed more if families were convinced that they would receive help and support. There is to be some money for home educators, but it is unclear whether that will go towards the cost of local education authority bureaucracy, or whether some of it will go towards helping home educators provide things, such as science equipment if that is what their children are interested in. The crux of the matter is that many people feel that this is a licence to interfere and the whole move is representative of a societal attitude that seeks to quantify and standardise everything.
	Proposed new section 19E does not reassure, as proposed new subsection (1)(a) allows LEAs to determine whether the education is suitable. Many children are home educated because they were not thriving in the state system and their parents made a positive decision to home educate. Indeed, the siblings of some of the children I met were perfectly happily in the state education system; their parents had made a specific decision about one child, not for reasons of dogma or because they thought they knew best, but because that was what was best for that particular child. It is important to bear that in mind. During the recess, I met a number of home-educated children and I was struck by the breadth and variety of the learning experiences made available to them by committed parents. The concern is that some well-meaning local education authority officer with the bog-standard training will insist on changes so that the national curriculum of the day is more closely adhered to at home.
	The problem with the education system, which I have been following for many years, is that it suffers from fads. Such fads have included the literacy hour and the numeracy hour, which the Secretary of State does not seem to like very much because he is getting rid of them. Over the years opinions have changed as to the best way to teach children to read, but the reality is that although there may be an overall "best way", some children learn in different ways. A good teacher will adapt to that, and home educating parents are doing exactly the same, by adapting to what their children need. I hope that reassurances can be given in Committee on this issue.
	On personal, social and health education, I fully support both what the hon. Member for Nottingham, North (Mr. Allen) said about needing to get rid of that term and talk instead about "life skills", and the provisions in the Bill. I served on the Select Committee on Health in 2002, when it undertook an inquiry into sexual health. We had as witnesses a number of young people who were scathing about the sex education that they had received. They all made a number of interesting observations, the first of which related to the "geography teacher" syndrome-I do not know why the geography teacher is always picked out for approbation. Not all teachers are instinctively comfortable delivering this part of the curriculum, even with training. There is nothing worse than being taught this subject or taught about relationships by a teacher who is embarrassed, so we need to have specialist teachers or good, high-quality training, with an opt-out if the teacher does not want to deliver this subject. Bad PSHE is worse than no PSHE.
	The second point made to us strongly by those children was that those in their peer group who were taken out of classes were often those in the most need of information. It was not that their parents wanted them to receive this education at home; it was that their parents did not want them to be educated about sex and relationships at all. That is a problem, and we should consider-this might sound like a slightly wacky idea-involving parents more in what is going on and running courses for them so that they can follow up at home on some of the topics that are brought up in school. Some parents would like to talk about this subject-some teenagers would want them to do so like they want a hole in the head, but such an approach would be helpful.
	The third point that was made to us dealt with alcohol, peer pressure and self-respect. The hon. Member for Salisbury (Robert Key) made the point well about the impact of alcohol and the fact that it leads to careless attitudes, and we have to address this part of our education too.
	Let us compare our approach with what happens in Sweden, which has a programme of relationship-based education. We always talk about "sex and relationships", but we should be talking about "relationships and sex education". Sweden's relationships education encourages people to talk about relationships in a way that covers friendships, bullying, respect for individuals and relationships with the opposite sex-as has been said, a holistic approach is much the best one. The schools also arranged, as part of the curriculum, a visit to the young people's sexual health clinic-we nearly put this in the report, but we decided that it would not pass the  Daily Mail test. We found that the clinics were not just places that dished out condoms and contraceptive pills; they involved multidisciplinary teams. If their people found that a young person was being promiscuous, they would arrange for a psychologist to have a chat with that person, because they took the view that such behaviour was a sign of deeper problems. The evidence from places such as Sweden and the Netherlands shows that better sex education leads to an increase in the age at which young people have their first sexual experience and to fewer partners. Although I welcome the Government's sense of direction, I hope that they will take specific account of some of the details.
	In the remaining few moments available to me, I wish to talk briefly about the family courts. I welcome the move towards more openness, because we have probably all encountered constituency cases where we were not able to see the reports from the courts, where a parent was accusing the judge of bias or a professional of not doing a job properly and where it was difficult to obtain transparency. Clearly, that is wrong and there needs to be some accountability, but the new rules have been in place for less than a year and this issue is extremely delicate, and so change has to be introduced gradually.
	The media's prime interest is in selling newspapers. I have a constituency example. My female constituent was involved with Fathers 4 Justice and details were published in the press that meant that her daughter could be identified, going against everything that is supposed to be possible. My constituent challenged that in court and the judge effectively said that because of her high-profile position, her daughter did not enjoy the same protections as other children. We talk about opportunities and protections for all, and there should not be any impact on the children just because their parents might be involved in something that we do not like. Apparently, section 97 did not apply because my constituent had put herself in the public domain by protesting and courting publicity for her cause, so her children were not entitled to the same protection as others. Given that the media are totally irresponsible and exist only to sell newspapers, they will publish and be damned. I think that we need to be very careful before giving them carte blanche to ruin children's lives.

Mark Field: I appreciate the opportunity to make a brief contribution to the debate. Given the time constraints, I hope that you will forgive me, Mr. Deputy Speaker, if I focus on the aspect of the Bill that is of particular interest to me: home education.
	Almost exactly one year ago, the Department for Children, Schools and Families launched an independent review of home education by Graham Badman. Fearful that it represented another attempt by the Government to intrude into their lives, two home educating parents from my constituency, Tina Robbins and Helen White, came to meet me in Parliament to see what could be done. Home educators have long suspected that the Government are uncomfortable with the idea of parents providing an education that cannot be monitored, tested or accounted for. That applies, I suspect, to Governments of all political colours, and of course to local education authorities. In many ways, the outcome of the report confirmed that suspicion.
	I have to admit that in my initial meeting with my two constituents, I had misconceptions that a home education might produce an unsocialised, precocious child, unable to interact with his or her peers and shielded from all negative influences. However, the more I listened to the two mothers talk, the more I was impressed and excited by the passion and enthusiasm that they displayed for home education. Each parent was able to provide their child with an individualised learning experience, tailored to that child's ability and interests.
	Inspired by that dedication to individualised learning and that determination to fight Government impositions, in a Westminster Hall debate last June I decided to defend home educators against some of the most controversial recommendations in the Badman report-compulsory annual registration; annual home visits by local authority officers, which we have heard about; and a right for local authority officers to interview a child away from their parents.
	I must confess that I was absolutely overwhelmed by the reaction to the speech that I made that day. Not only did it receive extensive support from my constituents, many of whom I had no idea shared a passion for the subject, but I received countless letters and e-mails from home educators across the country. The important point to stress is that home educators are a very diverse group of individuals with no single voice. There has been a great lobby, but it should be stressed that we are talking about individuals, to a large extent. So sacred is their independence that for a long time they have chosen to remain under the radar. However, nationwide, in the past year, they have felt compelled for the very first time to stand up and demand that their voice be heard.
	The results are quite remarkable. As we know, the Department has been flooded with correspondence. Meetings have been set up with numerous MPs from every mainstream party. There has been a massive co-ordinated internet campaign, too. As Members know, that all resulted, only last December, in the biggest mass petition ever seen in the House.
	A review of elective home education by the Children, Schools and Families Committee has also broadly assisted the cause. Released just before Christmas, the Committee's report rejected the idea of compulsory registration of home-educated children and made clear the Committee's disappointment at the
	"less than robust evidence base that the Badman Report and the Department have presented with regard to the relative safeguarding risk to school and home educated children."
	The report went on strongly to discourage the notion that local authority home education teams should be given a more overt safeguarding role and questioned the Department's somewhat optimistic cost estimates for more robust monitoring by local authorities. It concluded:
	"The way in which the Department has handled the Badman report has been unfortunate-from the way in which it framed the review, through to its drafting of legislation prior to publication of the related consultation findings. We trust that the Department will learn from this episode".
	In the light of the outcry of home educators and the criticisms of the review, I question how the Government can proceed with the plans in the Bill. Home education has been under constant scrutiny since the Children Act 2004 enshrined the Government's Every Child Matters agenda in legislation. Home educators with whom I have engaged conclude only that either the Government have no faith in the previous reviews or the Badman report was from the start a superficial exercise designed to allay public concern-a bid somehow to make good other failures with frenetic activity; or, worse still, that child welfare concerns were being used as a cover for a Government obsessed with monitoring and targets to interfere in a sphere over which they currently have little influence.
	Home educators vigorously reject the attempts by the Government to mix concerns about child welfare into any review of home education, and I believe that they are right. They believe that the Government's concerns in this regard are in line with the misguided understanding that a child is safe when seen once or twice by a local authority. I am not diminishing in any way some legitimate concerns about child abuse and I have a great deal of sympathy with some of the problems faced by the Government, particularly in other Departments, in preventing cases similar to the appalling ones that we have recently seen, but we must be clear: local authorities already have powers to get involved in a family when there are concerns about abuse.
	The uncomfortable truth is that no amount of legislation will ever remove all risk. The task of the Government is to balance the rights of all individuals. Given that home-educated children are not proven to be at any greater risk, it is inappropriate to throw away the liberty of parents to choose how to educate, particularly when it is equally possible for a child to go to school and be abused when they return home or, indeed, for children in the care of the state to suffer abuse.
	On top of all the concerns over the conflation of education and welfare are fears about the implications of monitoring home educators. Monitoring is not a neutral activity and is likely to require tick boxes to ascertain whether a child is receiving a suitable education. Although a seemingly harmless word, the definition of "suitable" is worryingly subjective.
	If a more formal monitoring system is implemented, it will come with severe practical and cost implications. Of course, for any monitoring to be worthwhile, staff will have to be trained. If no extra funding is forthcoming-a likely scenario in these difficult economic times-budgets currently allocated to ensuring the welfare of genuinely vulnerable children could be diverted to such things. That would be a real waste and, of course, a risk when the Government have already stated that they are confident that the great majority of home educators are doing a first-class job.
	That majority feels that the Government are incapable of trusting parents to do the best for their children. Yes, parents fail sometimes, but, let us be honest, so too do the Government. Without being able to prevent all cases where a child is abused or not provided with a decent education-of course, such cases can happen just as often when the state is involved-it is for Governments to assess risk and ask which areas warrant most attention.
	Increased intervention makes little financial sense and has the potential to divert resources from truly vulnerable children. It also further infringes the rights of parents to make what they believe are the right decisions for their children. Current legislation is perfectly adequate but all too often poorly understood. Any Government must guard the sacred right of parents to educate their children, while vigorously tightening the current system when it comes to child welfare. After that, the Government should look to their own ability to fulfil the Every Child Matters objectives, rather than continue to pursue those who put their faith, time and passion into home education. I believe that these proposals should be firmly rejected.

Graham Stuart: In the few minutes that I have, I shall address the subject of home education, as my hon. Friend the Member for Cities of London and Westminster (Mr. Field) did in an excellent speech. From the Front Bench, my hon. Friend the Member for Surrey Heath (Michael Gove) spoke a lot of commons sense on the topic, as did the hon. Member for Romsey (Sandra Gidley), who addressed it in the first half of her speech.
	Under clause 26 and schedule 1, local authorities will have a duty to run a licensing system-that is what it is-for all home-educating parents in their areas, complete with monitoring by local authority inspectors, who will have to be hired and trained and sent out in order to have all their meetings. Local authorities may revoke a parent's licence to educate their own child or refuse to give one if the inspectors do not think that that child is receiving a suitable and efficient education; if they deem the families to be unco-operative-God forbid that any family should be unco-operative when an inspector from the local authority comes knocking on the door; or if the parents fail in any of the administrative requirements imposed on them by the Bill.
	It has always been the duty of parents, not the state, to educate their children, and they may choose to do so through school or otherwise. That historic settlement will be turned on its head by the Bill, which tears from parents and gives to the state the decision as to how a child is to be educated. We have heard much about guarantees in this debate, but for many parents, the freedom to choose how their child is educated is the ultimate guarantee.
	A small minority of parents elect to educate their children at home, for a variety of reasons-I will not go into that, but various speakers have mentioned the diverse nature of parents who home educate. Under the current legal framework, parents are trusted to do the right thing by their child unless there is clear evidence to the contrary. Of course, some home-educating parents do not do a good job of educating their child, but overwhelmingly, what evidence we have suggests that that is a tiny minority, and nothing said by Ministers has done anything to dispel that view. To deal with that tiny minority, the Secretary of State wants to set up a huge licensing bureaucracy with a long list of reasons why home-educated children can be sent back to school, whatever the opinion of the parents and the child. Because of this Bill, the cloud of suspicion will be extended to the many, not the few.
	As I understand it, the Government have three principal motives for introducing the licensing inspection proposals: first, the Department for Children, Schools and Families says it has evidence from serious case reviews and other such things that under the guise of home education, some children are at risk of suffering harm or being denied an education; secondly, Ministers point out that they intend the measures to give the state the power to guarantee that every child receives a suitable education; and thirdly, Ministers say that to allow local authorities to provide greater support and other services to home-educating families, they need a better idea of the numbers.
	As we heard from the hon. Member for Mid-Dorset and North Poole (Annette Brooke), the Government made no effort before introducing such a major licensing system-this draconian set of powers-to support home-educating families. Indeed, they wrote to her specifically to say that absolutely no money was available for home-educating families. On the Department for Children, Schools and Families website today, in the small print on the page about the home access scheme, which is designed to provide grants for parents to look after their children, it says that home-educated children are specifically excluded. That is the history under this Government, of which home-educating parents are well aware. There has been lots of suspicion, but no support, and now Ministers tell us that their approach is all about education, support and a more co-operative relationship between parents and local authorities. However, I am afraid that none of the home-educating families out there feels the same.
	There has been a lot of concern about the fact that the consultation on the Badman proposals was not published before the Bill was published, despite the Cabinet Office guidelines, to which the Department is a signatory, which say that Departments must ensure that any consultation is meaningful and can properly influence decisions. I thank the Minister for Schools and Learners, with whom I had a meeting last week, for saying that he would do everything possible to ensure that as much information as possible was provided, but the response to that consultation was published yesterday. That hardly helps to inform our deliberations too well today, except for those who are particularly astute.
	The numbers were 230 in favour, 4,497 against and 106 unsure, yet Ministers keep making out that it is a minority of people who are opposed. It is not a minority. A system is being set up, supposedly for the benefit of home-educated children and their families, to create, according to Ministers, a co-operative atmosphere, yet that system is being forced on to families, practically none of whom wants it. Ministers should ask themselves whether they want to bring such help to families who are so adamant that they do not want to receive it.
	It is not that families do not want help or would not welcome access to the home access scheme, or to libraries or other facilities-the points that the Badman report makes on that have been fully supported by the Select Committee on Children, Schools and Families-but where is the guarantee of support in the Bill for home-educated families? The Bill is full of guarantees, but anyone who searches through it for such guarantees will find that there are none. There is no evidence of any additional money and no evidence that home-educating families will be treated fairly as taxpayers and citizens. What is guaranteed is a large licensing scheme. What is also guaranteed is that the local authority will impose a school attendance order on those who fail to put their child on the register, regardless-it specifically says this in the legislation-of the quality of the education provided to that child. In other words, the administrative convenience of the local authority is to be put ahead of the interests of the child. That is what is in the Bill.
	My hon. Friend the Member for Surrey Heath touched on this issue, but in connection with the Badman review, on which the hon. Member for Blaydon (Mr. Anderson) spoke last week, it is also worth mentioning that bad data lead to bad decisions. That is what the legislation is based on. One member of the Badman review's expert reference group described the review as
	"slap dash, panic driven, and nakedly and naively populist".
	That is the basis on which the Government have moved forward.
	As I mentioned in an intervention on the Secretary of State, New Zealand had a similar monitoring and licensing system. It ran the system for several years and found that there was no problem with home-educating families. It therefore scrapped the scheme last year, saying that it was a waste of time and money. Is it not time that Ministers learnt from that experience and did likewise?

Nick Gibb: Well, here we are, Mr. Speaker, a new year and a new education Bill. It is now almost an annual event, with nearly as many education Bills as finance Bills. We have had the School Standards and Framework Act 1998, the Learning and Skills Act 2000, the Education Act 2002, the Education Act 2005, the Education and Inspections Act 2006, the Education and Skills Act 2008, the Apprenticeships, Skills, Children and Learning Act 2009 and now the Children, Schools and Families Bill in 2010.
	It is not just the 50 clauses and four schedules of this Bill or the 270 clauses and 16 schedules of last year's Bill that are the problem; it is the scores of regulations that each of these Bills spawns and the dozens of sets of statutory guidance and programmes of study that local authorities, governors, head teachers and teachers all have to read, absorb and act upon that is the real burden.
	It is becoming almost axiomatic that, legal skills are as necessary as pedagogical skills to succeed in education these days. Legal skills and knowledge will become even more important if the Government succeed in putting on to the statute book the pupil and parent guarantees in the opening clauses of this Bill, which is why the Association of School and College Leaders is right to warn that these guarantees will
	"open the flood gates for increased litigation against schools".
	As the hon. Member for Yeovil (Mr. Laws) pointed out, how is the local government ombudsman going to be able to enforce loosely defined guarantees about the quality of education?
	If an education Bill every year were not evidence enough of a directionless and rudderless education policy, the escalation of ever-grander promises from curriculum entitlements to pupil guarantees should be a warning. After nearly 13 years of this Government and billions of pounds of extra taxpayers' money, we still have a situation in which 40 per cent. of 11-year-olds are leaving primary school struggling with the basics of reading, writing and maths, and half of all children qualifying for free school meals fail to achieve a single GCSE above grade D. It is all evidence that the Government have failed to tackle the problems that lie at the root of underachievement in too many schools, which will not be resolved by passing yet another law saying that bad schools should not be allowed or declaring that henceforth all pupils and parents will receive better guarantees.
	I now know that my hon. Friend the Member for Salisbury (Robert Key) was a teacher at the school that my father attended-Leeds grammar school-but not, I think, at the time of my late father. He is right to say that the pursuit of ideas lies at the heart of democratic politics and that it requires a broad, liberal and high-quality education system. The hon. Member for Yeovil is right to say that the proposed report card risks becoming a box-ticking exercise. As my hon. Friend the Member for Surrey Heath (Michael Gove) pointed out, 84 per cent. of the schools in New York are graded A and 13 per cent. are graded B under a report-card system; in fact, only seven schools in New York were graded D or F last year.
	The hon. Member for Yeovil is also right to question, as we do, the value of personalised home-school agreements-a point also well made by the right hon. Member for Don Valley (Caroline Flint), who rightly fears that the Government are mixing up the pastoral care of pupils, an ongoing matter for a pupil's personal tutor, with home-school agreements, which should be about the ethos of the whole school.
	Just before Christmas, I visited a primary school in London. I sat in on a remedial reading lesson for an 11-year-old girl. The child was barely literate after seven years of primary education and despite three years of twice-weekly, one-to-one tuition. She was being shown flashcards of simple words that she had rehearsed hundreds of times over the years. She managed to read the word "even", so I asked the teacher if the child could read the word with the first "e" covered up. The teacher covered up the "e" leaving the word "ven". The child could not read it. She did not know what the letter "v" sounded like, so she could not begin to sound out the word.
	Why is it that that little girl, who was meant to be able to read the word "even", could not read the word "ven"? The answer is that she had not been properly taught the sounds of the alphabet and how to blend them. She had been drilled in the "whole word recognition" method, which simply does not work for the least able children and works only inefficiently for other children. That is not an isolated example. In last year's SATs, 9 per cent. of boys and 4 per cent. of girls failed to register a grade in the key stage 2 English tests. That means that they are starting secondary school completely illiterate.
	How does the Bill propose to reform primary education? By creating six "areas of learning" and, in each "area of learning", a programme of study with 84 objectives running from E1 to E24, from M1 to M29, and from L1 to L31. The Government claim that that is a more flexible arrangement, but what could be more prescriptive and undermining of the professionalism of teachers than to be faced with 84 detailed objectives that they all know will have to be incorporated into their lesson plans on pain of criticism by Ofsted? For example, on a particular day a teacher will write on the board "Objective: to recognise how authors of moving-image and multi-modal texts use different combinations of words, images and sounds to create effect and make meaning". That is what happens. They will write the objectives on the board, and that will be one of them on one particular day if the Bill comes into effect.
	The Qualifications and Curriculum Development Agency simply cannot help itself. This proliferation of objectives-this bureaucratic tick-box approach to education-bears the hallmarks of the QDCA, the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority and the Government since they were formed, and it is one of the key reasons why we have not seen improvements in our education system despite the billions that have been spent.
	As for home education, my hon. Friend the Member for Isle of Wight (Mr. Turner)-who has vast experience in the field of education-expressed concern, shared by many Members, about the dangerous increase in state intrusion into people's homes. As he pointed out, clause 26 and schedule 1, if implemented, would stamp out the individuality that home educators cherish.
	The hon. Member for Romsey (Sandra Gidley) referred to the Government's timidity about letting people get on with their own lives. My hon. Friend the Member for Cities of London and Westminster (Mr. Field), who has conducted an effective campaign on the matter, referred to the passion of home educators, and asked how the Government could proceed with the provisions given the overwhelming opposition to them. That is a question that Ministers need to answer.
	In a powerful speech, my hon. Friend the Member for Beverley and Holderness (Mr. Stuart), who chairs the all-party parliamentary group on home education, emphasised people's fundamental freedom to educate their children. That presumption and that freedom are undermined by the Bill.
	Clause after clause of this Bill demonstrates Ministers' lack of understanding of the underlying causes of the problems in our education system. It proposes pupil and parent guarantees that will land head teachers and governors in the courts; home-school agreements that will become a bureaucratic nightmare for heads, with a bespoke contract for each child that will be reviewed and rewritten every year; a new curriculum for primary schools with hundreds of prescriptive objectives serving only to undermine teachers and kill the joy of education; and a new licence for teachers that is also designed to undermine their confidence.
	I am not sure that our education system can stand yet another Bill that deluges schools with ever more prescription, and diverts schools from their core purpose of educating children. I am not sure that our schools or our teachers can continue with an education policy that is so lacking in focus, and so overtly political and ideological. I am not sure that our country can continue with an education policy that continues to fail so many children from deprived and disadvantaged backgrounds. This Bill will do nothing to tackle the deep-seated problems that are the cause of underachievement in too many schools. It needs to be consigned to the wastepaper bin, and I urge Members in all parts of the House to help us to do just that.

Vernon Coaker: Yes, we have all seen improvements in school buildings in Rotherham and other areas of the country.
	The hon. Member for Yeovil (Mr. Laws) raised a point about people acting in loco parentis. Such people fall into a number of categories, including the following: those employed in a capacity where a legal ban on physical punishment applies, such as school teachers or child minders; people within, or close to, families, such as step-parents, parents without parental responsibility and babysitters; and people in educational or quasi-educational settings. Where such people administer physical punishment resulting in actual bodily harm or constituting cruelty, they would be prosecuted and would not be able to rely in court on the defence of reasonable punishment. I am not aware of any evidence that the law as it stands is not working as it should in this regard.
	A number of Members on both sides of the House raised the important topic of home education. We all want to strike the right balance in respect of allowing parents their proper right to exercise their responsibility for their children, and to educate at home should they choose to do so. It is also right for us to balance that against the need to ensure that we have the education standards we want, including for children who are educated at home; and, in that context, issues in respect of safeguarding arise.
	In dealing with some of the issues raised by a number of people, including the hon. Members for Isle of Wight (Mr. Turner), for Cities of London and Westminster (Mr. Field), for Beverley and Holderness (Mr. Stuart), for Romsey (Sandra Gidley) and for Meirionnydd Nant Conwy (Mr. Llwyd), and my hon. Friends the Members for Huddersfield (Mr. Sheerman) and for Vauxhall (Kate Hoey), the fundamental right is that of the child not to be denied a suitable education. The local authority must consider the wishes and feelings of the child when carrying out monitoring. In most cases, parents provide a good education, but when that is not the case, the state should intervene. The monitoring of home education will be done with a light touch and it will be proportionate, so parents who are doing a good job will not see much difference from the current arrangements.
	The Bill focuses on education, not on safeguarding, and safeguarding issues will be dealt with in the usual way. It is inconceivable that a local authority would revoke registration for a genuine mistake. The legislation says that registration "may" be revoked, and in such cases parents can appeal to an independent panel if the local authority behaved unreasonably. There is no right to see children on their own but this is a factor that can be taken into account if the authority decides to seek a school attendance order, and there is no right of entry under these provisions. I hope that what I have said has answered some of the general points that people have been making.
	A number of Labour colleagues, including my right hon. Friend the Member for Don Valley (Caroline Flint), my hon. Friends the Members for Nottingham, North (Mr. Allen), for Ellesmere Port and Neston (Andrew Miller), for Amber Valley (Judy Mallaber), and for Tamworth (Mr. Jenkins), my right hon. Friend the Member for North-West Durham (Hilary Armstrong), and my hon. Friends the Members for Huddersfield and for Vauxhall, made interesting contributions to this debate.
	The Bill sets out a number of real developments and policy reforms. It sets out guarantees that will ensure that young people who fall behind in primary school or who start secondary school not at the appropriate level will receive one-to-one tuition. Key stage 1 is primary education and if the hon. Member for Yeovil were to read what we have said, he would find that we are talking about one-to-one and small group tuition at this stage. For key stage 2, we are talking about one-to-one tuition and for year 7 we are talking about one-to-one and small group tuition, so our approach does include small group work in primary schools.
	The new primary school curriculum is set out in the Bill, and it has been massively welcomed across the whole education sector. Notwithstanding what the hon. Member for Bognor Regis and Littlehampton said, a large number of primary school teachers, primary heads and education professionals have generally welcomed the new primary school curriculum that we are introducing.
	I have taught personal, social and health education and I believe that making PSHE compulsory is another major step forward. I was astonished when the hon. Member for Surrey Heath informed us that the Conservative Front-Bench team opposes the Bill's proposal to change from 19 to 15 the age up until which parents will have the right withdraw their children from such education. The Conservatives wish to keep the law as it stands, whereby parents will have the right to withdraw their children up until they are 19. They may think that somebody who is 18 or 19 years of age can be told by their mother or father that they cannot have sex and relationships education, but that is nonsensical, as people will see when they consider the matter.
	May I also quickly mention report cards, which are another -[Interruption.]

Jo Swinson: I am delighted to have secured a debate on the effect of media images on the body image of women and girls-a topic that has sparked a great deal of discussion in the past year, both in the media and among the public.
	Nowadays we cannot escape media images of impossibly beautiful people, whether on magazine covers, billboards or in newspapers. There is increasing pressure on people-especially women and girls, but increasingly men and boys-to make themselves as beautiful as possible.
	Beauty itself seems no longer to be in the eye of the beholder. Instead of a wide range of body shapes and sizes being presented, we are fed a restricted diet of one narrow ideal of beauty. The cult of ultra-thin is worshipped by those aspiring to look like the skinny models on the catwalks or the teeny-tiny celebrities in the magazines. Those in the public eye who commit the ultimate sin of eating and being a normal size are named and shamed, with articles and photos documenting their fall from grace. Some people say that that has always been the case, but Marilyn Monroe would be called fat by today's standards, and even the fit and slender Cindy Crawford would look large in comparison with her size zero counterparts.
	The skinny ideal is reinforced by the media. If we go into a newsagent's today, particularly in January, the magazine headlines scream out the obsession with thinness: "My fight for a new body"; "Diet special: how we got our amazing bikini bodies" or, especially worrying, "Diet or die!" All those are headlines in magazines that are currently on sale.
	Increasingly, the images that we see are not even real, as modern technology makes it easier than ever to manipulate pictures digitally. Retouching is widespread in the modern media. Sometimes that is done to remove the odd spot or blemish, to smooth skin or add shine to hair, but, in many cases, the whole shape of people's bodies has been altered-waists cinched in, breasts enlarged, legs lengthened or muscles pumped up. A recent Ralph Lauren advert showed a model who had been retouched to the extent that her waist was smaller than her head.
	Indeed, it seems that some politicians are not immune to that vanity. The Minister may have seen the Conservative party's new billboard featuring a picture of the Leader of the Opposition looking more than a little airbrushed. I know that he wanted to present the new face of the Conservative party, but had not realised that he meant it literally.

Jo Swinson: The hon. Gentleman makes an excellent point. Nationally, Dove's campaign for real beauty is another example of celebrating the diversity of beauty in everyday life.
	Why does all this matter? It matters because the images we see have an effect on how people feel about and behave towards their bodies. That can be extremely serious. In November last year, a report entitled "The Impact of Media Images on Body Image and Behaviours: A Summary of the Scientific Evidence" was written and signed by 45 leading academics, doctors and clinical psychologists from the UK, USA, Australia, Brazil, Spain and Ireland. The report is available on the Real Women campaign website, realwomen.org.uk. I will summarise its findings, but I encourage the Minister to read it in full. It states that
	"the experience of negative thoughts and feelings about one's body and appearance is a powerful (in fact, the most potent) and consistent precursor of a whole range of unhealthy body-related behaviours."
	Those include unhealthy dieting regimes and problematic eating behaviours such as starving, bingeing and purging; clinical eating disorders, such as anorexia and bulimia; cosmetic surgery; extreme exercising; and in boys and men, unhealthy muscle-enhancing behaviours, such as taking steroids or other supplements. Such images are also linked to depression, anxiety, sexual dissatisfaction and low self-esteem.
	The evidence also tells us that idealised media images have a detrimental effect on the clear majority of women and adolescent girls. There have been fewer studies carried out on men, but meta-analyses show that
	"exposure to the muscular male ideal is also linked to greater body dissatisfaction".
	Hospital admissions for bulimia and anorexia among girls under 18 leapt by 47 per cent. last year according to House of Commons figures. Media images are not the only factor responsible for that list of health problems, but they are a significant risk factor.
	The problem starts at an early age. One study of girls aged from five to seven found that girls had less body esteem and a greater desire for a thinner body after exposure to images of thin Barbie dolls, compared with girls exposed to images of dolls with a healthy body size. People are not necessarily fully aware of the extent to which images are digitally altered. In a poll by Dove last October, 42 per cent. of more than 1,000 women said that they could not tell when an image had been airbrushed or digitally enhanced.
	As I mentioned, Dove has used normal women as models in its adverts for the last five years as part of its successful campaign for real beauty, which in itself proves that products can sell without the adverts having to conform to the super-skinny beauty ideal. We need to change the culture that says that in our society only thin is beautiful, and nothing less than perfection will do. There is no magic wand we can wave to create that change overnight, but the Liberal Democrats' real women campaign is calling for a few simple steps to start the process: we are seeking to make images used in advertising more honest and to equip people to respond to them in a healthy and appropriate way. Firstly, we propose that in adverts aimed at adults, advertisers should be honest about the extent of digital retouching they have employed. Secondly, in adverts aimed at children, people should be presented realistically, as they actually look, without digital retouching. Finally, the national curriculum should ensure that children receive education about media literacy and body image issues.
	The Advertising Standards Authority already has codes of conduct that regulate what can and cannot be put in adverts, and we are all used to seeing disclaimers on adverts to comply with those rules. For example, L'Oreal has been made to state on its shampoo adverts that Cheryl Cole is actually wearing hair extensions, and admit that Eva Longoria is wearing false lashes in its mascara adverts. However, the ASA acts only in response to complaints about specific adverts.
	The Minister may be aware that in response to almost 1,000 complaints received as part of the Real Women campaign, the ASA recently banned an advert for Olay Definity anti-wrinkle products featuring Twiggy. It upheld the complaint that the advert was misleading because viewers were led to believe that Twiggy's appearance was achieved using the product and not through digital alteration. However, it rejected the claim that the advert breached the requirement that
	"All marketing communications should be prepared with a sense of responsibility to consumers and to society."
	Its report stated that
	"in the context of an ad that featured a mature model likely to appeal to women of an older age group, the image was unlikely to have a negative impact on perceptions of body image among the target audience and was not socially irresponsible".
	It appears not to have considered the scientific evidence, which shows that although young people may be especially at risk, media images also cause body dissatisfaction and unhealthy behaviours in adult women.
	Rather than a piecemeal, advert-by-advert approach, we need all adverts to be up front about the perfected images they portray. Bringing honesty about retouching into advertising is not rocket science. The ASA should work with the advertising industry to come up with a suitable labelling system, perhaps one that is similar to the traffic light system on food packaging, and amend the advertising codes to require adverts to display the retouching icon showing the level of retouching used in that ad. That would help consumers to distinguish between minor retouching, such as removing the odd blemish, and the extensive digital surgery that is increasingly common in adverts. As with the traffic light scheme, that might also change the behaviour of advertisers, who may be reluctant to airbrush so heavily if consumers know the extent of it.
	There is clear public support for a change to the advertising codes. A ComRes poll in October for the Young Men's Christian Association, whose healthy bodies campaign is highlighting current concerns about body image, found that
	"77% of people believe that airbrushed photographs should carry a health warning".
	The Dove poll I mentioned earlier found that 96 per cent. of women would like advertisers to be honest about the extent to which they airbrush or digitally retouch pictures and adverts.
	Children are especially vulnerable to body image pressure. The YMCA poll found that 88 per cent. of people believed children to be under more pressure about their physical appearance than they were 20 years ago. That is backed up by research by Girlguiding UK. Shockingly, its focus groups heard that girls as young as seven equated being attractive with being happy. Research that it conducted in July among young women found that 50 per cent. of 16 to 21-year-olds would consider having surgery to change the way they look.
	Because children are more vulnerable, we already have guidelines that apply only to adverts aimed at them. For instance, clause 7.2 of the Broadcast Committee of Advertising Practice's television advertising code rules that
	"Advertisements must avoid anything likely to encourage poor nutritional habits or an unhealthy lifestyle in children."
	The evidence that I have outlined strongly suggests that airbrushing in advertising does just that. I hope the Minister will state in his response whether he agrees that the ASA should bring advertising companies together to form an agreement that images of people should not be digitally altered in adverts aimed at children. When the Liberal Democrats launched their proposals on airbrushing back in August, the Minister for Women and Equality, the right hon. and learned Member for Camberwell and Peckham (Ms Harman), was quoted as saying:
	"We are happy to back this campaign".
	I hope that the Minister's Department agrees.
	Of course, we cannot protect children from such images for ever, which is why we must also empower them to develop the resilience that they need to be able to think critically about media messages. The 45 experts to whom I have referred agreed in their summary of evidence that
	"training in media literacy (to increase critical awareness of 'perfected' media models and the harm they can do) reduces the immediate negative effects of exposure, and more systematic, intensive interventions over days or weeks can significantly reduce one important risk factor: internalisation of the slender ideal."
	Some 50,000 people signed to a "Body confidence" petition on the No. 10 website last autumn calling for the school curriculum to include lessons to help to deal with body image issues. They were backed by Gok Wan, whose "How to Look Good Naked" TV series has been a breath of fresh air in giving women of all shapes and sizes more body confidence.
	In December, the Department for Children, Schools and Families published an independent report by Professor David Buckingham entitled "The Impact of the Commercial World on Children's Wellbeing". It concluded that the Department should set up a panel to look at how media literacy can be incorporated into the national curriculum. I was glad to hear that the Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families agreed with that conclusion. I wonder whether the Minister could give us an update today on what progress has been made on that so far.
	The steps that I have outlined are only a start. They need to precipitate many more wide-reaching changes. It is not only advertisers who are at fault. The trend towards using increasingly skinny models is worrying. Frankly, it is about time that the recommendation of the model health inquiry was implemented-for instance, at London fashion week next month-for models to have a health certificate, signed off by an eating disorder specialist, in order to protect their health and well-being, as well as that of their audience. Fashion designers have a role to play too. The sample sizes of their clothes are so small that the editor of  Vogue magazine recently admitted to retouching to make models look bigger, as the only models who fit into them look so unhealthy.